AI’s ‘middle class’ has gotten dramatically better at hacking
Brief
As the White House and federal agencies grapple with frontier AI models and their hacking capabilities, researchers are warning that the industry’s “middle class” of smaller models may end up posing a greater threat over the long term.
Research from XBOW this week shows that a growing class of both proprietary and open-source models are becoming strategically important in the offensive security ecosystem. Models like Z. ai ’s open-weight GLM-5. 2, xAI’s Grok 4. 5, Anthropic’s Opus 4. 7, Meta’s Muse Spark 1. 1, still perform very strongly at many hacking and exploitation tasks that worry policymakers.
“It’s not even that the open-source variants or…not quite frontline competitors are catching up [to frontier models] as such,” said Albert Ziegler, head of AI at XBOW.