In a formal statement released Thursday, Taiwan’s Ministry of Digital Affairs confirmed that a coordinated wave of cyberattacks targeting the island’s government agencies in July utilized artificial intelligence agents to boost the scope and efficiency of the intrusions. While Taipei has long pointed to Chinese actors as the source of the vast majority of the millions of daily cyberattacks that hit the self-ruled island, officials stopped short of naming a specific perpetrator in their update on this latest incident.
Cross-strait tensions have risen steadily in recent years, as Beijing maintains its claim that Taiwan is an integral part of Chinese territory and has ramped up military, political and diplomatic pressure on the island. Taipei has repeatedly accused Beijing of leveraging a range of so-called “grey zone” tactics – actions that stop short of open military conflict – including persistent cyber intrusions to wear down and harass the island’s government and institutions.
According to the ministry’s statement, affected agencies have already completed all necessary response and remediation measures to contain the breach. Officials did not, however, release additional details about the total scale of the attacks, the level of damage caused, or which specific agencies were targeted. What the ministry did outline is the novel hybrid approach attackers used: combining traditional hacking methods with AI agents, most notably the open-source AI agent platform OpenClaw, to streamline and scale their operations.
“AI agents can rapidly chain together multiple attack techniques and use secondary systems — such as backup and testing systems — as jumping-off points, giving the attacks the characteristics of high speed, low cost, and large scale,” the ministry explained in its statement. Notably, Chinese technology firms have capitalized on growing interest in the open-source OpenClaw platform, offering low-cost, simplified installation and coding packages that help users deploy the platform’s AI agents on cloud servers, making these enhanced attack tools more accessible than ever.
The ministry’s confirmation came in response to a recent report from the Financial Times, which first named Taiwan as the target of an autonomous AI-powered attack linked to suspected Chinese hackers. Citing researchers from Israeli artificial intelligence firm Dream, the FT reported that hackers built a fully autonomous attack tool using open-source AI agents, which deployed up to eight independent agents to map 21 separate government systems, identify unpatched vulnerabilities, and automatically adjust tactics when attempts to access systems were blocked. The outlet called the incident the first publicly documented attack of its kind.
Kenny Huang, chairman of the Taiwan Network Information Center, noted that while AI integration in cyberattacks is not a new development, this breach marks the first publicly confirmed incident where multiple coordinated AI agents were used to carry out a large-scale intrusion against government targets. For years, the United States and other major powers have raised growing alarms over state-backed hacking operations attributed to Beijing that target government agencies, military infrastructure and private sector businesses around the globe. Beijing has consistently denied these accusations, maintaining that it formally opposes all forms of cyberattack and actively enforces crackdowns on malicious cyber activity.
Taiwan says AI agents used in cyberattacks targeting island
