Arbitrum Halts New Stylus Contract Activations Amid Rising AI-Assisted Attack Threats

Arbitrum has temporarily suspended the activation of new Stylus contracts on its Arbitrum One and Nova networks as a precaution against increasingly sophisticated AI-assisted attack vectors, according to the Arbitrum Security Council. The emergency measure was implemented at around 23:30 Beijing time on October 2. The restriction applies mainly to new programs and app updates that require fresh activation. Stylus applications that have already been activated will continue to run as normal, and standard Solidity contract deployment and execution are not affected. Arbitrum said the move was driven by concerns that WebAssembly programs could exploit nonstandard Stylus compiler toolchains. The network has not seen any loss of funds so far; officials said the main risk is disruption to chain activity, including potential denial-of-service (DoS) attacks. Developers can still prolong the life of existing programs through the permissionless keepalive renewal mechanism. Activating expired programs or rolling out new application versions remains blocked for now.