Over the past couple of weeks, a cybersecurity researcher watched as a Chinese-speaking hacker broke into websites belonging to more than 100 companies, including farm equipment maker Deere, home appliance company SharkNinja and engine manufacturer Cummins.

The cybercriminal instead outsourced the hacking spree almost entirely to artificial intelligence, tasking AI agents with spending hours autonomously probing and breaking into targeted sites, according to Snorre Fagerland, principal threat researcher at the cybersecurity company NorForge.

In a report provided to Reuters ahead of publication on Monday, Fagerland said the hacker was one of several he discovered while scanning the web for inadvertently exposed instances of Cairn, an open-source AI problem-solving platform popular with hackers. Beginning around October 2, Fagerland said he found about two dozen instances of Cairn being used for malicious activity, which allowed him to quietly peer over the cybercriminals’ shoulders as they set their AI tools loose on the world.

Fagerland’s report on the Chinese-speaking hacker did not name the victims, but Reuters was able to establish the victims’ identities by independently reviewing the hacker’s Cairn activity.

At a time of rising anxiety over the power of autonomous AI tools, Fagerland said his find was real-life evidence that commercially available AI agents could pull off complex intrusions from start to finish without human intervention, a dramatic boost to the power of a single malicious actor.

Reuters could not ascertain the degree to which the breaches resulted in unauthorized extraction of data.

” SharkNinja said the hack had hit a standalone site carrying only product support information and that the threat had been contained.

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