Arbitrum pauses new Stylus contract activations to counter AI-assisted attack risks

PANews reported on October 3 that, according to a report from the Arbitrum Security Council, Arbitrum took emergency action around 23:30 Beijing time on October 2 to temporarily block new Stylus contract activations on the Arbitrum One and Nova networks in response to increasingly sophisticated AI-assisted attack risks.

The restriction mainly targets programs and application updates that require brand-new activation, while already-activated Stylus applications can continue to run, and ordinary Solidity contract deployment and execution are unaffected. Arbitrum officials said this precautionary measure stems from WebAssembly program attack threats targeting non-standard Stylus compiler toolchains. No risk of fund theft has been found so far, and the main concern is on-chain activity and denial-of-service (DoS) attacks. Developers can still extend the lifecycle of existing programs through a permissionless keep-alive renewal mechanism, but cannot activate expired programs or new versions of applications.