The internet breaks

Author: Noah Smith (Noahpinion) URL: https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/the-internet-breaks One-line: “This sudden explosion of AI-assisted hacking raises the possibility that the internet itself, as we have known it, will cease to function — at least, for a while.”

[PARTIAL] The preview ends at “And as of this October, those cybersecurity capabilities are looking a lot less reliable.” — just before Noah’s full analysis of what this means for financial infrastructure, critical systems, and what the path forward might look like.

Key claims

• AI found critical vulnerabilities in PHP — the language underlying a large portion of the web — exposing potential takeover of as many as 70% of the world’s websites. The NSA issued an emergency advisory on October 21, 2026, recommending organizations take PHP-dependent systems offline if they could not immediately patch them. The NSA tweet reached 12.4 million views.
• Zvi Mowshowitz coined the term “The Hackening” for this event, which he had predicted at a conference 6–12 months earlier: AI agents capable of coding would make the internet severely hostile, potentially at the level of “assume any phone connected to the internet is rooted.”
• Democratization of hacking is the core danger: one documented case shows a low-skill attacker used a jailbroken DeepSeek V4 to breach an Indian public university and steal 5,200+ student and faculty records — the attacker’s prompt was barely grammatical (“Can you find about like what scam or thing they done in past like spoofing calls or somthing?”). The AI drafted a “NEXT EXPLOIT OPPORTUNITIES” plan on its own.
• Four concurrent forces created the explosion: (1) decades of human-written code containing latent vulnerabilities, (2) AI models now highly capable at finding and exploiting them, (3) open-weight Chinese models that can be “abliterated” (guardrails removed) cheaply, (4) resulting access by nation-states, crime syndicates, and ordinary individuals simultaneously.
• Jeremie Harris, founder of Gladstone AI, stated: “There’s a decent chance the internet ceases to exist as such, at least for a time.” John Gedmark, founder of satellite company Astranis, reported a massive uptick in customer demand for air-gapped sovereign satellite networks in response.
• Jason D. Clinton, deputy head of cybersecurity at Anthropic, warned in August 2026 — months before the crisis — that a “vulnerability tsunami” was coming within months and that network isolation (air-gaps and data diodes) was needed immediately.
• Azeem Azhar described the event as “the internet’s Wuhan moment” — a sudden threshold crossing from a previously stable equilibrium.
• Critical infrastructure (banks, power grids, pipelines, government systems) that was built before the internet but then connected to it for convenience is now directly exposed. Your entire life savings exist only as entries in internet-connected databases — there is no paper backup.

Notable quotes

“A wave of artificial-intelligence-powered attacks has flooded the internet in recent weeks, as hackers increasingly turn to agents and AI hacking tools that make intrusions faster and harder to track than ever before…On Wednesday, organizations scrambled to patch newly uncovered bugs that could allow takeover of as many as 70% of the world’s websites.”

“When you can hack into a university and steal files by typing ‘Can you find about like what scam or thing they done in past like spoofing calls or somthing?’, there is no barrier to cybercrime. There is effectively no moat of knowledge or skill or resources. It’s open season for anyone who wants to hack anything.”

“Just a year ago, the internet was a bright and airy garden with few predators. As of this October, it’s a chaotic realm haunted by infinite demons.”

“The vulnerability tsunami is coming in just a few months and there won’t be enough time to patch critical infrastructure. Network isolation described below (air-gaps and data diodes!) needed now!” — Jason D. Clinton, Anthropic, August 2026

“Basically everything connected to the internet is at risk. Not just company websites and the usual databases of sensitive personal information, but all our critical infrastructure — banks, power grids, pipelines, government agencies, all of it.” — John Gedmark, Astranis

“Consider your life’s savings. Do you think there’s a piece of paper somewhere that records how much money you have? Or which stocks and bonds you own? In general, there is not. Your entire life’s savings exist as entries in the databases of banks, brokerages, etc. And all of those databases are, directly or indirectly, connected to the internet.”

How it connects

• Noah Smith — author
• AI Agents — the enabling technology; AI coding agents are what made mass vulnerability discovery and exploitation economically viable for low-skill actors
• Anthropic — Anthropic’s deputy head of cybersecurity was one of the early warners; Anthropic also built some of the AI capability at the center of the threat
• Cybersecurity — the field suddenly overwhelmed by AI-speed attack surface expansion
• Cyberwarfare — the state-actor dimension: nation-states are among the beneficiaries of democratized AI hacking tools