AI TRENDS | NEAR Co-Founder Says AI Is Accelerating Hackers' Discovery of Software Flaws

NEAR Protocol co-founder Illia Polosukhin said AI is significantly accelerating hackers' ability to find software vulnerabilities, making traditional code review methods difficult to sustain. According to Odaily, he said last October's Balancer incident marked the beginning of AI-assisted hacking and that older review models based on human checks are no longer sustainable in the AI era. Polosukhin said formal verification, which uses mathematical proofs to ensure code behavior matches specifications, should be adopted. He said AI can generate most of the proofs, while humans verify their correctness, shortening the time needed to produce them. He added that formal verification should extend beyond smart contracts to key internet and network software. On the same day, NEAR announced an upgrade that lets users switch to post-quantum account keys, and the network can automatically expand capacity as activity increases.