A.I. and Humans Battle It Out in a Cybersecurity Showdown

Source Domain: www.nytimes.com

On a recent Friday morning, seven cybersecurity veterans gathered in a suite on the 60th floor of the Cosmopolitan hotel in Las Vegas.

Surrounded by laptops, network cables, spare Wi-Fi antennas and a wall-mounted television that doubled as a massive computer screen filled with esoteric programming code, they spent the next two days hacking into a computer network in San Antonio as part of an annual event called the National Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition.

As this “red team” of cybersecurity professionals attacked the network, dozens of elite computer science students sat in makeshift command centers across the country, trying to stop them.

“Any time we gain access to their machines and steal data, they lose points,” said Alex Levinson, one of the leaders of the red team. “And the expectation is that we attack with custom malware — something unique and special they have never seen before.”

Run by the University of Texas, San Antonio, the event welcomed 10 collegiate “blue teams,” each the winner of a regional contest earlier in the year. This elaborate competition aimed to simulate the high-stakes world of cyberwarfare, which meant it included a new participant: artificial intelligence. And one of the blue teams was made up entirely of so-called A.I. agents, working mostly on their own.

With A.I. poised to play an increasingly important role in cybersecurity, the elaborate hacking competition demonstrated both the power of these systems and their limitations. They can help attack computer networks. And they can help defend. But they are also prone to mistakes. And they cannot yet match the skills of seasoned cybersecurity professionals — or even those of the country’s most promising computer science students.

But A.I. companies continue to improve these technologies. Anthropic said last month that it would limit the release of its latest A.I. technology, Claude Mythos, to a small number of trusted organizations because it might provide a…

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