I have long maintained that smart contracts are a dumb idea: that a human process is actually a security feature. Here’s some interesting research on training AIs to automatically exploit smart contracts: > AI models are increasingly good at cyber tasks, as we’ve written about before. > But what is the economic impact of these capabilities? In a recent MATS and > Anthropic Fellows project, our scholars investigated this question by > evaluating AI agents’ ability to exploit smart contracts on Smart CONtracts > Exploitation benchmark (SCONE-bench)­a new benchmark they built comprising 405 > contracts that were actually exploited between 2020 and 2025. On contracts > exploited after the latest knowledge cutoffs (June 2025 for Opus 4.5 and March > 2025 for other models), Claude Opus 4.5, Claude Sonnet 4.5, and GPT-5 > developed exploits collectively worth $4.6 million, establishing a concrete > lower bound for the economic harm these capabilities could enable. Going > beyond retrospective analysis, we evaluated both Sonnet 4.5 and GPT-5 in > simulation against 2,849 recently deployed contracts without any known > vulnerabilities. Both agents uncovered two novel zero-day vulnerabilities and > produced exploits worth $3,694, with GPT-5 doing so at an API cost of $3,476. > This demonstrates as a proof-of-concept that profitable, real-world autonomous > exploitation is technically feasible, a finding that underscores the need for > proactive adoption of AI for defense...