Good morning. Corporate cybersecurity defenses are under growing pressure to keep up with ever-more powerful AI.

In the latest sign of AI’s cyber potential, hackers used a Chinese artificial-intelligence agent to attack South Korea’s biggest banks and steal the personal information of 68,000 people, The Wall Street Journal reports. It marks one of the first such AI-powered intrusions into the global financial system, according to the Journal:

The attacks were the latest to highlight the vulnerability of even hardened targets to hackers using freely available AI tools. In previous cases, governments and nonfinancial corporations were hit, but it is unusual for banks to fall victim to hackers assisted by AI agents.

AI poses a unique set of challenges on the cybersecurity front, especially when it comes to understanding the identity and intent of agents. 

“The biggest set of changes are coming with AI agents because agents’ identity can change. Human identity doesn’t change,” said Jay Chaudhry, founder and CEO of cybersecurity company Zscaler.

He met Monday with the WSJ Leadership Institute. Zscaler holds its Investor Day today in New York.

Chaudhry says the company experienced firsthand the power of AI to disrupt cyber defenses. “When Mythos preview came out, we were part of Project Glasswing from day one,” Chaudhry said. “And as we tested it, we found that it is pretty damn powerful,” he said.

In response, Chaudhry adjusted the priorities of his engineering team for about three months, with a focus on fixing critical and high-level vulnerabilities superseding the delivery of new functionality.

Every company is going through the same exercise.

“Fixing software vulnerabilities is what Mythos brought to the limelight. Every CIO I talk to is working on it, but is very worried because software always has vulnerabilities. There’s so many unfixed vulnerabilities and there’s not enough time and resources,” he said.

How is your company coping with the need to relentlessly patch and update software as AI makes it easier to find vulnerabilities? Send your feedback to me at steven.rosenbush@wsj.com (if you’re reading this in your inbox, you can just hit reply).

• Former Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon warned that AI is more likely than not to slip out of human control and could cause human extinction at a hearing Monday with New York City lawmakers, who are weighing a spate of bills to rein in the rapidly advancing technology. Representatives of OpenAI, Meta Platforms and Google also participated in often tense exchanges, the WSJ reports. City lawmakers are floating bills on whistleblower protections and a city-run AI “kill switch.”

• Hackers used a Chinese artificial-intelligence agent to attack South Korea’s biggest banks and steal the personal information of 68,000 people, the WSJ reports. Investigators in Seoul said the attacks showed traces of an AI agent called Artex AI, developed to help organizations identify vulnerabilities in their networks. Officials haven’t identified any culprits.

• Insurers are bracing for multimillion-dollar claims from “rogue” AI agents and experts say executives such as Sam Altman and Dario Amodei could potentially face liability, the FT reports. Some also expect lawsuits against the AI labs themselves, possibly modeled on past environmental, tobacco and pharmaceutical litigation.

• DeepSeek is close to raising at least 80 billion yuan ($12 billion), well above its 50 billion yuan target, with CATL and Tencent among the biggest backers after its V4 Flash model drew strong investor interest. The funding is a step toward a highly anticipated IPO in early 2027, Bloomberg reports.

• Meta and Microsoft, two of Anthropic’s largest corporate customers, are cutting their employees’ use of Claude as they push their own AI tools and cheaper alternatives, The Information reports. Microsoft has lowered its projected $1 billion in internal Claude spending by more than a third, while Meta’s Claude Code users have halved to about 30,000.

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Follow Isabelle Bousquette on LinkedIn, Instagram, X, and TikTok for more behind the scenes on her tech and AI coverage, and lately, her contributions to the WSJ Leadership Institute’s new Executive Resilience series, where she’s profiling America’s top execs about their fitness and wellness habits.

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Steven Rosenbush is chief of the enterprise technology bureau at the WSJ Leadership Institute. He also has a column. You can follow him on LinkedIn.

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