Cybersecurity AI: The World's Top AI Agent for Security Capture-the-Flag (CTF)

TL;DR

In 2025, a specialized AI agent called CAI dominated major cybersecurity Capture-the-Flag competitions, outperforming human teams and raising questions about the relevance of current contest formats for measuring security talent.

Contribution

The paper introduces a novel AI architecture, alias1, that achieves unprecedented performance and cost efficiency in cybersecurity CTFs, surpassing human capabilities and challenging existing evaluation methods.

Findings

CAI achieved top ranks in multiple 2025 CTF competitions.

CAI captured 41/45 flags at Neurogrid and outperformed humans in speed and accuracy.

The alias1 model reduces inference costs from $5,940 to $119, enabling continuous autonomous security operations.

Abstract

Are Capture-the-Flag competitions obsolete? In 2025, Cybersecurity AI (CAI) systematically conquered some of the world's most prestigious hacking competitions, achieving Rank #1 at multiple events and consistently outperforming thousands of human teams. Across five major circuits-HTB's AI vs Humans, Cyber Apocalypse (8,129 teams), Dragos OT CTF, UWSP Pointer Overflow, and the Neurogrid CTF showdown-CAI demonstrated that Jeopardy-style CTFs have become a solved game for well-engineered AI agents. At Neurogrid, CAI captured 41/45 flags to claim the $50,000 top prize; at Dragos OT, it sprinted 37% faster to 10K points than elite human teams; even when deliberately paused mid-competition, it maintained top-tier rankings. Critically, CAI achieved this dominance through our specialized alias1 model architecture, which delivers enterprise-scale AI security operations at unprecedented cost efficiency and with augmented autonomy-reducing 1B token inference costs from $5,940 to just $119, making continuous security agent operation financially viable for the first time. These results force an uncomfortable reckoning: if autonomous agents now dominate competitions designed to identify top security talent at negligible cost, what are CTFs actually measuring? This paper presents comprehensive evidence of AI capability across the 2025 CTF circuit and argues that the security community must urgently transition from Jeopardy-style contests to Attack & Defense formats that genuinely test adaptive reasoning and resilience-capabilities that remain uniquely human, for now.