OpenAI's artificial intelligence model GPT-4 has the capability to hack websites and steal information from online databases without human help, researchers have found. That suggests individuals or organisations without hacking expertise could unleash AI agents to carry out cyber attacks. "You literally don't need to understand anything – you can just let the agent go hack the website by itself," says Daniel Kang at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. "We think this really reduces the expertise needed to…

In recent years, large language models (LLMs) have become increasingly capable and can now interact with tools (i.e., call functions), read documents, and recursively call themselves. As a result, these LLMs can now function autonomously as agents. With the rise in capabilities of these agents, recent work has speculated on how LLM agents would affect cybersecurity. However, not much is known about the offensive capabilities of LLM agents. In this work, we show that LLM agents can autonomously hack websites, performing tasks as complex as blind database schema extraction and SQL injections without human feedback. Importantly, the agent does not need to know the vulnerability beforehand. This capability is uniquely enabled by frontier models that are highly capable of tool use and leveraging extended context. Namely, we show that GPT-4 is capable of such hacks, but existing open-source models are not. Finally, we show that GPT-4 is capable of autonomously finding vulnerabilities in websites in the wild. Our findings raise questions about the widespread deployment of LLMs.