AI-driven hacks threaten to kill DeFi — unless projects act now

Can DeFi survive an era in which an AI can find a dozen critical security bugs in a smart contract for just $1.22 in tokens?

That’s how much it cost Anthropic researchers on average to run previously exploited contracts through major LLM models. They discovered that more than half of the exploits in 2025 could have been found and autonomously carried out by AI agents.

AI tools are also able to quickly find security holes and weak points in infrastructure and governance too.

DeFi’s future is under a dark cloud right now, with more than a dozen platforms attacked since the start of April according to DeFiLlama, and $605 million drained.

The month began with the $285 million hack of Drift Protocol — a combination of social engineering and malware — followed in short order by Silo Finance (misconfigured oracle), Aethir (access control exploit), Rhea Finance (fake token contracts) and Volo Vault (compromised key) among other attacks.

The most devastating attack came on the weekend, when a hacker drained $290 million from KelpDAO’s LayerZero-based reETH bridge. It caused ripples across the ecosystem, with more than 30 protocols pausing some functions. Aave was among the hardest hit with up to $200 million in bad debt, despite its own industry-leading security standards. The incident suggests that a DeFi platform’s integrity may only be as good as the weakest protocol it interacts with.

Jefferies digital asset analyst Andrew Moss said that the KelpDAO attack threatened Wall Street’s recent embrace of the sector.

“The potential loss of trust poses both near — and longer-term risks regardless of who is to blame,” analyst Andrew Moss wrote. “Although we don’t expect TradFi firms to throw in the crypto towel, the rollout or expansion of tokenization initiatives across banks, asset managers, fintechs and payments may decelerate temporarily.”

Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like the threat will abate any time soon. Polymarket is currently pricing in the chance of another $100 million crypto hack this year at 76%.

Was AI even involved in April’s DeFi hacks?

None of the attacks in April have been conclusively linked to AI-identified exploits — with the biggest targeting infrastructure or governance rather than smart contracts — but many are convinced there is a link.

“I think this is AI,” posted Bankless host Ryan Sean Adams after the Kelp DAO exploit. “AI giving hackers dark superpowers. Defense has to catch up now — we’re out of time.”

Early NEAR contributor turned independent researcher Vadim also blamed AIs for a surge in exploits. He posted that smart contract bugs have been lying in plain sight all along, but the cost of finding them was too high — until now.

“AI collapsed the cost of code analysis. Finding exploits got 100x cheaper. Writing flawless code stayed just as expensive,” he wrote. 

“Use AI to find an exploit, test it on a fork, and if it works — the risk of getting caught is near zero.”

Quantstamp founder Richard Ma tells Magazine that AI discovering exploits is a “growing problem” for the sector.

“It’s been growing at a fast pace especially these last 6 months as AI tools for cyberattacks are getting more mature,” he says. “The attackers have a lot to gain and they have dedicated teams.”

“AI is being used because AI is a lot more scalable. You can throw compute at it instead of manpower and reap outsized rewards as an attacker.”

Ma says that AI tools like Claude Code are used legitimately to identify bugs and exploits so that developers can fix code before release. But those same tools can be used to identify security holes in already deployed contracts.

“You can simply use normal versions of the LLMs to directly identify bugs,” he says. “There’s no guardrails on bug-finding.”

So why aren’t DeFi platforms using these tools to find the bugs in their own platforms?

“They should,” he says. “I’d advise caution using DeFi platforms now until they catch up.”

Research shows AI is very good at finding exploits

Researchers from Anthropic tested the major models in December last year on 405 smart contracts that had been previously exploited. The LLMs found $4.6 million worth of exploits. Worryingly, the amount of dollars the AIs were able to extract was growing exponentially.