Japan, South Korea firms hit by major cyberattacks

The breaches in Japan and South Korea follow a separate incident days earlier in which Chinese and US models were used to steal hundreds of thousands of credit card details — an attack one analyst called one of the "most severe abuses of AI for exploitation" on record. Corporate leaders, especially in finance, describe industrial-scale AI hacking as a severe threat to business, and many are racing to adopt the technology themselves as the only antidote. An expert at Google pushed back on the framing that the danger is still ahead: "There's a misconception that the AI vulnerability race is imminent," the expert said. "The reality is that it's already begun."