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arXiv · 2603.11214

Measuring AI Agents' Progress on Multi-Step Cyber Attack Scenarios

Linus Folkerts·Will Payne·Simon Inman·Philippos Giavridis·Joe Skinner·Sam Deverett·James Aung·Ekin Zorer·Michael Schmatz·Mahmoud Ghanem·John Wilkinson·Alan Steer·Vy Hong·Jessica Wang
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Abstract

We evaluate the autonomous cyber-attack capabilities of frontier AI models on two purpose-built cyber ranges-a 32-step corporate network attack and a 7-step industrial control system attack-that require chaining heterogeneous capabilities across extended action sequences. By comparing seven models released over an eighteen-month period (August 2024 to February 2026) at varying inference-time compute budgets, we observe two capability trends. First, model performance scales log-linearly with inference-time compute, with no observed plateau-increasing from 10M to 100M tokens yields gains of up to 59%, requiring no specific technical sophistication from the operator. Second, each successive model generation outperforms its predecessor at fixed token budgets: on the corporate network range, average steps completed at 10M tokens rose from 1.7 (GPT-4o, August 2024) to 9.8 (Opus 4.6, February 2026). The best single run completed 22 of 32 steps, corresponding to roughly 6 of the estimated 14 hours a human expert would need. On the industrial control system range, performance remains limited, though the most recent models are the first to reliably complete steps, averaging 1.2-1.4 of 7 (max 3).

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Linus Folkerts, Will Payne, Simon Inman, Philippos Giavridis, Joe Skinner, Sam Deverett, James Aung, Ekin Zorer, Michael Schmatz, Mahmoud Ghanem, John Wilkinson, Alan Steer, Vy Hong, Jessica Wang. 2026-03-11. Measuring AI Agents' Progress on Multi-Step Cyber Attack Scenarios. https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.11214

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