Symantec finds AI agent hijacking unprotected models in "Skynet mode" to launch attacks autonomously

Symantec security researchers found an offensive AI agent that hijacks unprotected language models on the internet and uses them to autonomously carry out attacks, with the compute costs borne by the model owners; Symantec calls this practice of stealing access to others' models LLMjacking. Using a honeypot disguised as an open AI service, the researchers intercepted the full attack prompt in the summer of 2026: a five-layer jailbreak first disguises the model's identity, redefines the extraction of passwords, API keys and database contents as routine development work, then suppresses refusals with a fictional persona and a ban on words such as "ethics" and "illegal", with the fifth layer carrying 74 attack modules; the final instruction places the agent in a so-called "Skynet mode", authorizing up to 100,000 steps without human intervention, looping through scanning, infection, installing mining programs and calling back. The honeypot logged more than 127,000 requests from tens of thousands of addresses but did not execute these tools; the next day, another attack was intercepted from a different address, targeting a go2rtc camera server and delivering an XMRig mining script.