BOSTON (NEWSnet/AP) — Microsoft said Wednesday that U.S. adversaries are beginning to use its generative artificial intelligence to mount or organize offensive cyber operations.

It’s mainly Iran and North Korea, to a lesser extent Russia and China, the company said.

Microsoft and business partner OpenAI say they  jointly detected and disrupted the malicious cyber actors’ use of their AI technology, shutting down their accounts.

Microsoft said the techniques employed were “early-stage” and neither “novel or unique,” but it is important to expose them publicly.

Cybersecurity firms have used machine-learning focused on defense, principally to detect anomalous behavior in networks. But criminals and hackers use it as well, and introduction of large-language models led by OpenAI’s ChatGPT upped that game of cat-and-mouse.

Microsoft has invested billions of dollars in OpenAI, and Wednesday’s announcement coincided with its release of a report noting that generative AI is expected to enhance malicious social engineering, leading to more sophisticated deepfakes and voice cloning.

OpenAI said its GPT-4 model chatbot offers “only limited, incremental capabilities for malicious cybersecurity tasks beyond what is already achievable with publicly available, non-AI powered tools.”

Some cybersecurity professionals complain about Microsoft’s creation and hawking of tools to address vulnerability in large-language models when it ought to focus more on making them more secure.

“Why not create more secure black-box LLM foundation models instead of selling defensive tools for a problem they are helping to create?” asked Gary McGraw, a computer security veteran and co-founder of Berryville Institute of Machine Learning.

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