It’s now even easier to find—and exploit—vulnerabilities in computer systems using AI.

Last Friday, the Chinese AI company Z.ai announced a powerful open-weight model that it says is capable of automating cutting-edge coding and cybersecurity tasks almost as well as the best publicly available models from Anthropic and OpenAI.

The new model, GLM 5.3, could be a gift for companies looking to secure their systems against attacks, providing a cheaper way to scan for hidden bugs and other weaknesses. Open-weight—or free-to-download—models can be run on one’s own hardware and are often significantly less costly than closed models like Claude and GPT. Alongside the new model, Z.ai released OpenVuln, a service for scanning code repositories for vulnerabilities using GLM 5.3.

For now, the new model is in a limited release with trusted partners, but it shows how quickly open-weight models are gaining superhuman hacking skills. And that might pose problems if the model is harnessed by criminals and other bad actors.

That prospect is especially sobering following a string of startling incidents involving rogue AI agents with advanced cyber-skills. In recent weeks, OpenAI, Anthropic, and independent security researchers have revealed examples of agents escaping from testing environments and autonomously hacking into outside systems, including the research platform Hugging Face, to complete tasks.

On Monday, OpenAI president Greg Brockman warned in