Flutterby™! : Automating "smart" cryptocurrency contract exploits

The Register: At last, a use case for AI agents with sky-high ROI: Stealing crypto.

Arthur Gervais, professor in information security at UCL, and Liyi Zhou, a lecturer in computer science at USYD, have developed an AI agent system called A1 that uses various AI models from OpenAI, Google, DeepSeek, and Alibaba (Qwen) to develop exploits for Solidity smart contracts.

They describe the system in a preprint paper titled, "AI Agent Smart Contract Exploit Generation."

There seems to be some concern about legality, on the other hand, isn't the whole point of "smart" contracts supposed to be that they are the end-arbiter, and judicial backup isn't important?