Cutting-edge artificial intelligence technology is poised to supercharge offensive hacking capabilities, and urgent action is needed to face up to the threat, US, UK, Canadian, Australian and New Zealand officials have said.

“Frontier AI models are anticipated to exceed current industry expectations, fundamentally transforming both offensive and defensive cyber capabilities,” the intelligence alliance commonly known as the Five Eyes said in a three-page statement on Monday.

“The timeline is not years, it is months.”

The statement was light on detail and mostly restated core cybersecurity advice, such as swiftly patching faulty software and not putting systems online unless necessary.

The officials also urged defenders to use AI “to strengthen defence”, for example by identifying weaknesses sooner or responding more quickly to incidents.

The warning was another indication of officials’ increasing concerns over models such as Anthropic’s Mythos or OpenAI’s GPT-5.5-Cyber, which are said to allow users to quickly execute complex – and potentially devastating – hacks.

Earlier this month, Anthropic was forced to disable a version of Mythos after the US government ordered it to suspend access to the models for foreign nationals over alleged national security ‌concerns.

Around the same time, the US cyber-defence agency, CISA, which was among those co-signing Monday’s statement, reduced the deadlines imposed on government officials to deal with serious digital vulnerabilities in their networks to three days, citing AI threats.