Niall Kitson

Somewhere between the breathless claims that artificial intelligence (AI) will cure cancer and the fears that it is a bubble held up by accounting tricks sits a boring truth: the technology works. It works just badly enough to be dangerous. For criminals, which is to say businesses acting outside the law, AI doesn’t have to be good.

During a recent internal meeting, Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, admitted that the development of AI agents – automated tools designed to perform tasks for users – was falling short of the company’s initial expectations. He noted that progress on these systems had not accelerated over the past four months as anticipated, meaning that the strategic goals linked to this technology have not yet been achieved.