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Smart Contracts \ red.anthropic.com

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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 cutoff (March 2025), 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

Frontier Red Team AI agents find $4.6M in blockchain smart contract exploits Dec 1, 2025 Winnie Xiao*, Cole Killian* Henry Sleight, Alan Chan Nicholas Carlini, Alwin Peng *MATS and the Anthropic Fellows program 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 contrac

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