Hackers aren’t just stealing data anymore, they’re stealing your AI access

It sounds absurd: someone breaks into your system, and instead of emptying your database, they start making you pay for their AI.But that is increasingly the point.A stolen AI credential can give an attacker more than access to a company. It can give them computing power that the company has already paid for.Attackers are increasingly stealing API keys, login sessions and other credentials that provide access to AI services, using them to run their own workloads, resell the access or hide behind legitimate customer accounts. The target is no longer necessarily the data sitting inside an organisation. In some cases, it is the AI access itself.Anthropic’s September 2026 threat report describes an emerging criminal economy built around stolen AI access. Attackers are harvesting credentials from code repositories, mobile applications, websites, Docker containers, chatbots and other places where companies accidentally expose them.