Crypto Token’s 50% Wipeout Shows Magnitude of AI-Hacking Threat

When Eli Ben-Sasson helped create the Zcash cryptocurrency nearly a decade ago, the cryptographer worried about human adversaries. He didn’t expect that machine intelligence would one day expose a flaw that had eluded years of expert human judgment.

That reality rattled investors recently after a security researcher working with Zcash used Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.8 to uncover a critical vulnerability that had gone undetected for more than four years. After Zcash disclosed the flaw on June 4, the token — which traded at far higher levels just weeks earlier — tumbled about 50% as traders reassessed the security of one of crypto’s most prominent privacy networks.