Arbitrum Haults New Contract Activations Amid AI-Assisted Attack Fears

Arbitrum, a well-established layer-2 scaling solution, has taken emergency action to mitigate risks from AI-assisted attacks. As of October 2 at approximately 23:30 Beijing time, the Arbitrum Security Council temporarily blocked the activation of new Stylus contracts on both the Arbitrum One and Nova networks.

This precautionary measure targets programs and application updates that require fresh activation. However, already activated Stylus applications can continue running without interruption, and standard Solidity contract deployments and executions remain unaffected.

According to officials, this decision was prompted by threats involving WebAssembly programs exploiting non-standard Stylus compiler toolchains. At present, no funds have been stolen, but the primary concern is chain activity and potential denial-of-service (DoS) attacks.