An AI security specialist agent detected 92 percent of vulnerabilities in decentralised finance (DeFi) smart contracts that suffered real hacking damage. The Block reported on Feb. 20, citing research results released by AI security company Securo.

The study examined 90 smart contracts that suffered real hacking damage between October 2024 and early 2026. Verified losses from those contracts totalled $228 million. Securo’s specialist agent detected vulnerabilities worth $96.8 million. A GPT-5.1-based coding agent, a general-purpose model, posted a 34 percent detection rate and covered $7.5 million.

The two systems ran on the same frontier model. The performance gap came from the application layer, not the model. The Securo agent added DeFi-specific security methodology, structured review steps and DeFi-focused security heuristics on top of the model.

Separate research by Anthropic and OpenAI found AI agents can already carry out fully automated hacking from start to finish on most smart contracts with known vulnerabilities. Hacking capability is known to double about every 1.3 months. The average cost of an AI-based hacking attempt is about $1.22 per contract, sharply lowering the barrier to entry for large-scale automated scanning.