A recent cybercrime report by Malwarebytes found that AI agents will soon usher in a world of far more frequent, sophisticated and difficult-to-detect cyberattacks. Since ChatGPT's release in late 2022, criminals have rushed to exploit generative AI. Threat actors today are weaponizing these tools to write malware, craft convincing phishing emails, and launch realistic social engineering attacks.

In one case from January 2024, a finance worker was manipulated into transferring $25 million during a video call populated entirely by AI-generated deepfakes of company executives. Criminals have also found creative ways to bypass built-in AI safeguards, using techniques like prompt chaining, prompt injection and jailbreaking to produce their own malicious outputs. 

While generative AI has already lowered the barrier to entry for cybercrime, the report warns that agentic AI is poised to escalate these kinds of attacks. Agentic AI can replace human attackers, automating, accelerating and scaling labor-intensive techniques like ransomware.