Researchers Flag 7.5% of Open-Source AI Systems for Potential Criminal Use

Kenya, 29 January 2026 - Researchers are warning that a growing number of open-source artificial intelligence models are being deployed outside the safety controls of major technology platforms, creating what they describe as a largely unseen layer of potential criminal misuse.

The findings, shared by cybersecurity firms SentinelOne and Censys, are based on an analysis of publicly accessible deployments of open-source large language models conducted over a 293-day period. The researchers said many of the systems they observed were running on internet-exposed computers with limited or no safeguards, making them vulnerable to abuse by hackers and other malicious actors.

According to the researchers, self-hosted AI models can be repurposed to generate phishing content, automate spam operations, support disinformation campaigns, and assist in other illicit activities. Unlike commercial AI platforms, which operate under centralized rules and monitoring, open-source models allow operators to modify system instructions and remove guardrails entirely.

The analysis found that while thousands of open-source language model variants exist, a large share of internet-accessible deployments were based on well-known models such as Meta’s Llama and Google DeepMind’s Gemma. In hundreds of cases, researchers identified configurations where safety controls had been explicitly disabled.

Researchers were able to view system prompts, instructions that shape a model’s behavior, in roughly a quarter of the deployments they examined. Of those, about 7.5% were assessed as potentially enabling harmful activity, including scams, harassment, and data theft.

Geographically, about 30% of the exposed systems were operating from China, with roughly 20% located in the United States, underscoring the global nature of the issue.