Crypto token's 50% wipeout shows magnitude of AI-hacking threat

Crypto token's 50% wipeout shows magnitude of AI-hacking threat The same artificial intelligence tools helping developers audit code in cryptocurrency are also lowering the barriers for attackers, creating an arms race across the industry, researchers say. When Eli Ben-Sasson helped create the Zcash cryptocurrency nearly a decade ago, the cryptographer worried about human adversaries. He didn't expect that machine intelligence would one day expose a flaw that had eluded years of expert human judgment. That reality rattled investors recently after a security researcher working with Zcash used Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.8 to uncover a critical vulnerability that had gone undetected for more than four years. After Zcash disclosed the flaw on June 4, the token -- which traded at far higher levels just weeks earlier -- tumbled about 50% as traders reassessed the security of one of crypto's most prominent privacy networks. The exploit struck at the heart of Zcash's value proposition.