South Korean investigators say hackers used a Chinese-made AI agent called Artex to breach at least seven financial firms, stealing personal data belonging to 68,000 people.
The Wall Street Journal reports that Seoul officials first detected the attacks last week. The stolen personal information included some customers’ annual income and personal-loan limits. On Tuesday, South Korea’s National Police Agency opened a formal investigation through its cyber terror unit.
Investigators traced the intrusions to more than two dozen internet addresses spread across roughly a dozen countries, including the United States, Japan and Germany. No culprits have been identified so far, and officials said they are seeking international cooperation to track down those responsible.
At a cabinet meeting Tuesday, President Lee Jae Myung pressed banks to shore up their defenses. “Speed is of the essence,” he said, adding, “Implement the necessary measures immediately.”
The tool at the center of the investigation, Artex, is an open-source AI agent built by Li Puhua, a Chinese cybersecurity engineer who goes by the alias Autumn. Artex isn’t an AI model itself. It draws on existing models, including Anthropic’s Claude Opus, OpenAI’s ChatGPT and China’s DeepSeek, to provide cybersecurity services. Li designed it to help organizations find network vulnerabilities, not to enable attacks. South Korean officials have not said which underlying AI models were used in the bank breaches.
Officials believe hackers misused Artex to break into the banks and pull customer data. After reports of the initial breaches surfaced, Artex’s developer updated the tool’s user guidelines to prohibit unauthorized intrusions, data theft and other malicious use.
Mun Chong-hyun, who heads the Genians Security Center, a Seoul-based cybersecurity analytics firm, identified Artex’s potential involvement shortly after the breach came to light. “Cybersecurity attacks powered by AI agents have been increasing in South Korea, and I expect they will grow in number worldwide in the future,” Mun said.
Artex had drawn attention before this case, too. In September, it won a contest sponsored by several Chinese tech companies that named it the top agentic AI system for both offensive and defensive cybersecurity work.
News of the breach rattled South Korea’s stock market, then boosted part of it. Shares of domestic cybersecurity companies jumped as much as 30 percent on Tuesday.
The incident joins a string of recent cases tying AI systems to cybersecurity breaches. Anthropic alleged last year that state-sponsored Chinese hackers used its AI technology to automate break-ins at roughly 30 targets worldwide, including corporations and foreign governments. China denied wrongdoing and accused the United States of using cybersecurity claims to smear it. In September, Australian officials said an OpenAI agent had infiltrated a government website, accessing both public and nonpublic files on the country’s healthcare-statistics portal. And in recent weeks, Google’s Gemini model autonomously accessed the internet and hacked other companies during a test of its own cybersecurity capabilities.
The AI race between America and China continues to pick up steam, made more complex through the introduction of agentic AI. Breitbart News social media director Wynton Hall has written his New York Times bestseller Code Red: The Left, the Right, China, and the Race to Control AI to serve as the definitive guide on how the MAGA movement can create positions on AI that benefit humanity without handing control of our nation to the leftists of Silicon Valley or allowing the Chinese to take over the world.
Read more at the Wall Street Journal here.
Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of AI, free speech, and online censorship.