Posted by frays 6 hours ago
still has no mention of AI, but that will likely change as they increasingly dominate competition.
I just did a CTF where I was in the top 10. It was the first CTF I completed and I used AI because the rules permitted it. That said, I couldn’t solve all challenges.
But yes, it was significantly easier now than I last attempted one. Even manually solving with AI assisted assembly interpretation was much easier.
The same article talks about CTF skills as a way to learn about security best practices and separately a sport.
In reality it was all about learning an extremely important skillset (securing/attacking software and systems) that is getting automated.
The real thing the author seems to be frustrated about is AGI is coming in computationally verifiable domains first, and lot of his skillset was taken over in a big part.
This is like someone complaining that making machine parts has been ruined: Skillful craftsmen used to make them by hand using manual tools!
Nowadays the CAD/CAM/CNC cheaters have almost completely automated the whole thing. How is the next generation of craftsmen going to learn how to craft a gear by hand when the process of gear making has been reduced to pressing start on a CNC machine?!
See what I mean? Sorry, I think this article is just Luddite. I can empathize with the pain of your beloved craft basically being rendered obsolete by new technology, but the process can neither be stopped nor is it bad in general.
The manual skills you trained with CTF puzzles are now simply no longer relevant . (Field-specific) "AI orchestration" is the new cyber securtiy skill if LLMs really have become so good at this, and what the author used to do manually then has the same value as being able to craft a gear by hand.
Indeed, in the real world, plenty of people organize to do formerly-skillful tasks together. I have not personally crafted a gear by hand, but I have built a house in a long-abandoned style with a group of people only using hand tools.
There _is_ a danger that society forgets how to do these things. During that house-building exercise, there were many tricks of the trade that, while likely documented somewhere in a book, would have been difficult to reproduce without seeing a demonstration. From the standpoint of “does it matter?” it depends on what you care about. We absolutely do not need cruck-framed houses with scribed joints. Modern construction is faster and cheaper and lasts long enough. But it would sadden me greatly if practices like this faded from memory, because it’s one of those things that makes you gasp “wow!” when you see it. And your appreciation only deepens when you try it yourself.
As I don't know much about the CTF scene, I looked for other takes on this topic.
Here's an article from 2015 about how tool-assistance already changed CTFs:
> Individual skill will undoubtedly be a factor next year. But, I'm left wondering whether next year's DEFCON CTF will tell us anything more than how well-developed each team's tools are (and how well they can interpret the results).
https://fuzyll.com/2015/ctf-is-dead-long-live-ctf/
But there are quite a few recent (2026) articles with the same core message as in the original article, e.g., https://blog.includesecurity.com/2026/04/ctfs-in-the-ai-era/ or https://k3ng.xyz/blog/ctf-is-dead
And here's someone explaining how Claude Max allowed them to win CTFs:
> I had always been interested in CTF as one of the only ways people could compete and show off their skill in coding/problem solving on a global scale. It was just too difficult and didn't make sense for me to learn the fundamentals as an electrical engineer. As time went on, I got better and better, and it was hard to tell whether it was because of experience or if it was because of improvements in AI.
> I accomplished my goals, and for that reason I'm quitting CTF, at least for now. [...] I'd like to think I highlighted the problem before it became a bigger issue. So, how do we fix this? Teams and challenge authors losing motivation is not good. CTF dying is not good. AI bad. Or is it?
https://blog.krauq.com/post/ctf-is-dying-because-of-ai
The only article that saw LLMs as a non-negative force for CTFs was this one. Fittingly, it sounds like LLM output ("Let's be honest", "This is where things get interesting.") and only contains hallucinated references.
The reason LLMs can do CTFs so well is partially because the challenges are usually designed to avoid wasting time and to introduce a single concept without noise.
These models seems completely unbeatable only in the ads. There are 100+ times way someone puts Hindi Yoda talk In Morse Code and it goes nuts. The reason they are going to hard for PR Marketing on this is because they know it is a matter of time.
The only things that works is novelty and obscurity. LLMs still suck with things mentioned in the footnotes of datasheets and manuals, things that deviate in subtle ways, unique constructions that alter something very very common. It's hard for LLMs to avoid common pitfalls in terms of making assumptions, while staying on track.
Not as easy logistically...
Explicit ELO measurements with some cheating detection. AI assistance wholly banned. As you climb the ELO ladder, detection gets more onerous. At top level during online events, anti cheating teams require the use of both monitoring software and multiple cameras.
Idea is that you can cheat pretty easily at the lowest levels but it gets less easy the higher you go. This allows for better feeding into the truly elite competitions.
I think chess’s very firm stance that AI is never allowed in competition (neither online nor in person), rather than CTF’s acceptance, was the right call.
If CTF is a player-vs-player event, then AI should just be banned outright, otherwise it will devolve into AI-vs-AI, which is just not an interesting competition format, as we learned in chess. Compared to FIDE top events (which bans AI), only a tiny niche audience actually watches the Top Chess Engine Championship (AI-centered). It turns out what we care about is not whether chess can be solved by any means available, but what are the limits of the human mind in learning chess.
Pretty much all chess coaches/educators also warn against relying heavily on AI during learning; engines only give you an illusion of understanding.