Arbitrum Pauses New Stylus Activations Amid AI-Assisted Attack Risks

Arbitrum has paused new Stylus contract activations on Arbitrum One and Nova due to rising AI-assisted attack risks. The network's Security Council implemented the pause on October 2, 2026, by raising activation gas costs to a prohibitively expensive level, effectively pricing new activations out of reach.

The restriction targets Stylus contract activation, the step that makes a WebAssembly program executable on the chain, without touching code that is already live. Existing Stylus contracts continue to run, and ordinary Solidity deployment and execution on Arbitrum remain unaffected.

The Security Council attributed the pause to increasingly sophisticated, AI-assisted attacks built around hand-crafted WebAssembly programs that sidestep the standard Stylus compiler toolchain. These attacks primarily threaten chain liveness rather than user assets, posing a risk to network stability and uptime rather than direct loss of funds.