Trend Micro, a cybersecurity firm, has sounded the alarm over what it calls the rise of "vibe crime": fully automated cybercriminal operations powered by agentic AI, which marks a fundamental turn away from traditional ransomware and phishing campaigns. The report from the company forecasts a massive increase in attack volume as criminals take advantage of autonomous AI agents to perform continuous, large-scale operations.
From service to servant model
The criminal ecosystem is evolving from "Cybercrime as a Service" to "Cybercrime as a Servant," where chained AI agents and autonomous orchestration layers manage end-to-end criminal enterprises. Robert McArdle, director of forward-looking threat research at Trend Micro, stressed that the real risk does not come from sudden explosive growth but rather from the gradual automation of attacks that previously required a lot of skill, time, and effort.
"We will see an optimization of today's leading attacks, the amplification of attacks that previously had poor ROI, and the emergence of brand new 'Black Swan' cybercrime business models," McArdle stated.
Researchers expect enterprise cloud and AI infrastructure to be increasingly targeted in the future, as criminals use these platforms as sources of scalable computing power, AI, storage, and potentially valuable data to run their agentic infrastructures. This transformation is supposed to bring with it new, previously unthinkable types of attacks as well as shake up the entire criminal ecosystem, introducing new revenue streams and business models.
Industry-wide alarm bells
Trend Micro's alert echoes other warnings about an “agentic” AI threat in cyberspace. Anthropic acknowledged that its AI tools had been “weaponized” by hackers in September, criminals employed Claude Code to automate reconnaissance, gather credentials, and breach networks at 17 organizations in the fields of healthcare, emergency services, and government.
In a similar vein, the 2025 State of Malware report from Malwarebytes warned that agentic AI would “continue to dramatically change cyber criminal tactics” and accelerate development of even more dangerous malware. The researchers further stressed that defensive platforms must deploy their own autonomous agents and orchestrators to counter this evolution or face being overwhelmed. Organizations need to reassess security strategies immediately and invest in AI-driven defense before criminals industrialize their AI capabilities, or risk falling behind in an exponential arms race.
