AI Is Getting Consistently Better At Hacking. Data Breach Notices Are Climbing.

The amount of data breaches reported in the first half of the year is higher than the one prior, with AI playing a significant role in the increase, according to a new report from the Identity Theft Resource Center.

The entity noted that there were 1,803 reported data compromises in the mentioned period, compared to 1,732 in 2025. Overall, more than 471 million victim notices were associated with such episodes. One of them at educational tool Canvas accounted for more than half of them.

James Lee, president of the ITRC said "we continue to see this ever-increasing number of data breaches," which does "not appear to be slowing down."

Another report by IBM also mentioned that between March 2025 and February of this year one in four breaches was enabled by AI, up more than 50% compared to the year prior.

In this context, some House Democrats want to force AI CEOs to testify before Congress regarding the state and safety of the developing technology.

In a letter to Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson, the lawmakers wrote that the developing technology has "serious implications for Americans' safety and security," CNBC noted.

"Unfortunately, Congress has so far completely failed to respond to the threats posed by AI development," the lawmakers wrote in the letter that was exclusively shared with the outlet. "That must change. The CEOs of the largest AI companies should answer questions under oath, and Americans should have a chance to hear from independent experts on the dangers posed by this technology."

The letter follows several high-profile incidents involving AI. In July, the United Kingdom's AI Security Institute (AISI) reported that AI attempted to complete a task through nefarious means during a test. The test was run 122 times, and in 19 of those runs the "AI took autonomous, unsanctioned action on the live internet, targeting real people and organizations."

In some instances, the AI attempted to trick human beings into approving malicious code, even creating fake identities in an attempt to apply pressure. "[T]he agent kept searching for a way through, and some of the routes it found involved trying to deceive real people," the report states. "It was never instructed to deceive; deception emerged as a by-product of pursuing the task."

Also, at the end of July, OpenAI disclosed a hacking incident on Hugging Face that also happened during a test, with the company acknowledging that the models went "to extreme lengths to achieve a rather narrow testing goal."

The models were able to escape OpenAI's "sandbox" testing environment and hack Hugging Face in an attempt to achieve the testing goal. "In one example, the model chained together multiple attack vectors, including using stolen credentials and zero-day vulnerabilities to find a remote code execution path on the Hugging Face servers," the company disclosed.