An AI Hacker Broke Into This Writer's Smart Home in Minutes

A journalist who writes about AI deliberately let a rogue AI agent loose on his own home network. The tool came from Abliteration AI, a startup that sells powerful AI models with their safety limits stripped out — meaning the AI will do things normal chatbots refuse to, like hunting for security holes. With a helper program called CyberStrike, he pointed it at his home Wi-Fi. The cost: about as much as a pizza.

What it found was unsettling. In minutes, the agent mapped roughly a dozen devices and spotted real weaknesses. His printer was set up so that anyone on the network could log into it — a serious problem if tax returns or medical records were sitting in the print queue. His smart speaker was leaking details, including the last song played. The agent even broke into a PC, and showed that several quick, AI-written software projects were full of bugs.

This isn't just a stunt. The same hacking abilities are being built into mainstream AI tools — Anthropic's Mythos and OpenAI's Astra — but those are limited to trusted customers for now. Stripped-down versions are now for sale to anyone. The startup's founder argues this is actually good defense: utilities, banks and airlines are rolling out AI agents fast, and someone needs to test how those systems can be abused before criminals do.

The surprising ending is that the experiment left the writer oddly reassured. His rogue agent didn't just break things — it told him exactly how to fix them. His conclusion: the best way to defend against an AI hacker may be to have your own AI hacker. In the meantime, the practical steps are familiar ones — change default passwords, update your gadgets, and keep smart devices on a separate network from your important files.