Skip to content
You can now search across every topic, entity and event.What's new
AI: Jobs, Power & Money
28MAR

GPT-5.5 clears 32-step attack chain; two models in five days

4 min read
19:20UTC

The UK AI Safety Institute confirmed on 6 May 2026 that GPT-5.5 cleared the 32-step autonomous cyber attack chain benchmark, becoming the second model to do so after Claude Mythos, with AISI's Frontier AI Trends Report recording frontier cyber capability doubling every four months.

← Back to The AI jobs data contradicts itselfJump to analysis ↓
EconomicDeveloping
Key takeaway

GPT-5.5 and Claude Mythos both cleared the 32-step attack chain within five days, making it a class-level capability.

The AISI (UK AI Safety Institute, the UK Government body established in November 2023 to evaluate frontier AI capabilities) published its Frontier AI Trends Report on 6 May 2026, confirming that GPT-5.5, OpenAI's frontier language model, cleared the 32-step autonomous cyber attack chain benchmark known as "The Last Ones" (TLO). GPT-5.5 achieved 71.4% on the expert cyber suite and solved the TLO benchmark end-to-end in 2 of 10 attempts. GPT-5.5 is the second model to clear the benchmark; Anthropic's Claude Mythos cleared the same threshold on 1 May 2026 .

AISI's report assesses frontier cyber capability as doubling every four months. The 32-step attack chain benchmark triggered an emergency convening of five Wall Street bank CEOs by Treasury Secretary Bessent and Fed Chair Powell in April 2026, after Claude Mythos became the first model to clear it . Five days after Mythos cleared the threshold on 1 May, GPT-5.5 repeated the result on 6 May.

Two separate frontier models clearing the same benchmark within five days changes the nature of the risk assessment. A single-model capability that is deliberately kept under restricted access (as Mythos Preview was, through Project Glasswing with access limited to twelve partners) can be managed through deployment controls. A benchmark cleared by two models from different organisations within five days of each other is no longer a single-deployment governance question; it is a class of capability that has arrived across the frontier.

AISI's four-month doubling rate, if it holds, means the next iteration of the same benchmark class will be cleared by a broader set of models within months. AISI's evaluation function, confirming which models have crossed which thresholds, is doing the work that no other institution with formal standing has yet stepped in to perform. Whether that evaluation function informs regulatory action in any jurisdiction within a timeframe that is operationally relevant to the doubling rate is the question AISI's report leaves open.

Deep Analysis

In plain English

On 6 May 2026, the UK AI Safety Institute published a report confirming that GPT-5.5, an AI model from OpenAI, had passed a difficult cyber security test. The test involves completing 32 consecutive steps in a simulated computer attack without human help. Only one other model, Anthropic's Claude Mythos, had passed this test before, and it did so just five days earlier. The report also said that frontier AI models are getting twice as capable at cyber attacks every four months. This matters because cybersecurity has been one of the sectors least affected by AI job cuts, because the technology was not yet reliable enough to replace human security analysts. A confirmed four-month capability doubling, if it continues, changes that assumption within 12-18 months.

Deep Analysis
Root Causes

The relevance to the AI-jobs topic is the labour market implication of the four-month capability doubling that the body does not name explicitly. Cybersecurity is one of the few technology employment sectors that has remained at full employment or near it throughout the 2025-2026 restructuring cycle: demand for human cyber analysts has been resilient because autonomous cyber capability has been below the operational reliability threshold.

The AISI confirmation that two models have now cleared the 32-step benchmark changes the supply side of the cybersecurity labour market: if frontier AI models can autonomously execute 32-step attack chains at a 20% success rate today, security operations centres will face pressure to reduce analyst headcount as that rate improves toward operational reliability.

Lloyd's of London cyber underwriters base pricing partly on the probability of a successful autonomous attack on insured infrastructure, making the AISI benchmark confirmation an underwriting input. A confirmed four-month doubling of frontier cyber capability is an underwriting input that re-prices coverage upward, affecting every enterprise that carries cyber insurance.

What could happen next?
  • Risk

    Security operations centre headcount justifications at major banks and critical infrastructure operators begin to face the same AI displacement pressure as software engineering if the four-month doubling sustains through 2026.

    Medium term · 0.6
  • Consequence

    Cyber insurance pricing must incorporate the AISI-confirmed capability doubling as a loss probability input; Lloyd's and specialist cyber underwriters will reprice 2027 coverage upward.

    Short term · 0.7
  • Risk

    The absence of a second interagency convening following GPT-5.5's clearance, five days after the first model cleared the same benchmark, suggests the institutional alarm response is not scaling with the capability curve.

    Immediate · 0.65
Sources:Bloomberg / CFO Dive·Bloomberg / CFO Dive
Mentions:GPT-5.5 →Anthropic →OpenAI →Federal Reserve →Claude Mythos Preview →Project Glasswing →Codex 5.3 →Claude Opus 4.6 →RAND Corporation →UK AI Security Institute →
First Reported In

Update #9 · GitLab signs the manifesto, Brussels backs out

Bloomberg / CFO Dive· 15 May 2026
Read original →
Causes and effects
Caused by
UK vacancies frozen at 721,000 for six months
711,000 April reading breaks downward from six-publication plateau that had been the covered story
Occurred 10 Apr 2026
Read story →
This Event
GPT-5.5 clears 32-step attack chain; two models in five days
Two separate frontier models clearing the same 32-step attack chain within five days of each other confirms the benchmark is no longer a single-model capability threshold, removing the assumption that frontier cyber risk remains isolated to a single controlled deployment.
Different Perspectives
European Commission
European Commission
The European Commission's draft Annex III guidelines, closed for comment on 23 July, treat algorithmic scoring in recruitment, pay and termination as high-risk regardless of whether a human signs off, echoing Spain's Audiencia Nacional ruling 101/2026 on concealed scheduling algorithms. Brussels is shifting the fight from counting AI job losses to assigning legal liability for the tools themselves.
Office for National Statistics
Office for National Statistics
The Office for National Statistics recorded UK vacancies rising to 712,000 on 21 July, the first quarterly increase this beat has tracked, with payrolled employment down 85,000 on the year against May's 210,000 fall. The bulletin names no AI cause anywhere, and that is the point: nothing in the release confirms the displacement story it gets cited to support.
Christian Klein, SAP
Christian Klein, SAP
Christian Klein told investors on 23 July that SAP's research headcount will not grow for twelve months because AI agents and their token costs are absorbing the work, not because SAP is cutting jobs. He frames it as commercial arithmetic: the cost of AI-assisted coding tokens plus the salaries specialist AI hires command, not people being replaced by machines.
Betsey Stevenson, University of Michigan
Betsey Stevenson, University of Michigan
Betsey Stevenson argued that the 187,000 jobless-claims reading describes a market that hires little and fires little, not one AI is emptying. She said the real damage hides in eligibility rules and suppressed job postings, not in the headline layoff counts employers keep denying.
Comisiones Obreras, UGT and Concentrix's A Coruña works committee
Comisiones Obreras, UGT and Concentrix's A Coruña works committee
Comisiones Obreras, UGT and Concentrix's A Coruña works committee blamed Microsoft's push toward AI self-service for the 80 redundancies unions signed off on 22 July, not unavoidable business cause. A second Coruña procedure covering 80 more jobs runs to a 31 August deadline, and the unions want the state, not the employer, setting the pace of AI-driven cuts.
Stanford's 'We Must Act Now' signatories
Stanford's 'We Must Act Now' signatories
More than 200 academics, including 16 Nobel laureates, published a 13 July letter warning of AI-driven labour disruption, citing Daron Acemoglu's NBER estimate that AI's total factor productivity gain stays under 0.66% over ten years. The letter's own cited economics sit well below Goldman Sachs Research's 1.5-percentage-point estimate published the same week.