AI offensive cyber capabilities are doubling every six months, safety researchers find

Lyptus Research measured offensive cyber capability growth using the METR time‑horizon method and ten security experts.

They found capability doubling times were 9.8 months since 2019 and accelerated to 5.7 months since 2024.

Opus 4.6 and GPT‑5.3 Codex reach about a three‑hour time horizon at a two‑million‑token budget, and higher token budgets further extend capability.

The study evaluated 291 tasks and published its data on GitHub and Hugging Face.