Crypto hacks hit record pace in 2026, tracking closely with new AI model release
Security & Exploits ·
Incident data shows 145 crypto hacks by July 22, 2026, already surpassing the prior annual record, with the rate of attacks roughly doubling after April.
The figure, reported on x.com, puts 2026's hack count at 145 incidents through July 22, above the previous annual record of 97. That works out to one hack roughly every 1.4 days across the year to date, with Q2 producing 2.48 times more hacks than Q1.
The acceleration lines up with the release of Anthropic's Mythos, described as a new generation of frontier models, with the Mythos Preview launched on April 7. Before April, hacks occurred at a rate of 0.41 per day; after April, that rate rose to 0.99 per day, a 2.44 times increase, peaking near 1.3 incidents per day, according to the same x.com post.
The breakdown between incident count and financial damage diverges sharply. Protocol-logic bugs made up 84 percent of all incidents but only 28 percent of losses, while infrastructure hacks accounted for just 15 percent of incidents yet 72 percent of losses. Of the approximately 1.05 billion dollars stolen across 2026, five incidents alone accounted for two-thirds of that total, indicating that a small number of large infrastructure breaches drove most of the financial damage even though logic-bug exploits were far more frequent.
A second account in the same cluster corroborates the core figures, citing 145 crypto hacks as of July 22 and a 2.44x increase in hack frequency following the Mythos, also referred to as Fable, launch, matching the pace change described above. Two distinct sources are tracking this data set.
What remains unresolved is the precise causal link between Mythos's release and the surge in attacks: the material establishes a timing correlation and a measured increase in hack frequency after April 7, but does not specify which incidents, if any, directly involved AI-generated exploit code or tooling. It is also not yet clear whether the pace observed through July 22 will continue, accelerate further, or subside as the year progresses, nor how the five large infrastructure incidents responsible for two-thirds of losses were carried out.