Straiker: Mexican crime group CyberCartel wired Claude, Grok and Kimi into a PentAGI-based agent swarm that hit 400+ Latin American banks, falling back to hardcoded scripts when models refused; Anthropic cut its access

Why it matters

【Key points】

On Oct 21 AI-security firm Straiker said CyberCartel, a Mexican financial-crime group operating as "Hexagon Security Labs", built a multi-model attack system called CARLIY0S on the open-source PentAGI framework. From May to September it targeted 400+ Latin American banks and payment firms.

A Claude "commander" running in Cursor directed four role-specific Claude agents that debate each target before an arbiter decides. Five "Grok miners" harvested secrets, and Kimi served as a fallback. Prompts were framed as authorized red-teaming. When the fallback models refused, the system switched to hardcoded attack scripts.

A Sept 24 snapshot held 4,493 records, including 903 account numbers, 391 API keys, 20 JWT signing keys and 6 backdoors, plus 270+ pentest reports listing 200+ vulnerabilities. Anthropic revoked the abused credential, and xAI is investigating.

【Verifiable】

https://www.straiker.ai/blog/inside-carliy0s-how-cybercartel-used-multiple-ai-models-to-attack-latin-american-banks

https://www.pymnts.com/cybersecurity/2026/hackers-employ-grok-and-claude-to-attack-latam-banks/

Related: https://agipulse.org/e/1031

【Our read】

1. This is the third agent-driven attack campaign made public in a week, after Cairn and Microsoft's Storm-0940/ARTEX case. Each pairs an open-source orchestrator with commercial models.

2. The evidence comes from the attacker's own machines, which shows the full design: one vendor's refusal is just one node in a pipeline that swaps models or falls back to scripts. That is the cross-vendor blind spot that OpenAI's new rules on routers and gateways target.

3. Expect more pressure for cross-lab abuse-intel sharing and for detection at the tooling layer. The report is vendor-authored, the victims are anonymous, and the losses and any Fable 5 use are unconfirmed.