Arbitrum pauses new Stylus activations over AI-assisted attack risks
Arbitrum’s Security Council blocked new Stylus contract activations on Arbitrum One and Nova as a precaution against increasingly sophisticated AI-assisted attacks targeting hand-crafted WebAssembly programs. Existing active Stylus applications remain usable, and ordinary Solidity deployment and execution are unaffected. Developers may renew active programs through the keepalive mechanism, but cannot activate new code or reactivate expired programs during the pause. The restriction was implemented by making activation prohibitively expensive, without an ArbOS upgrade. The emergency action also added a safeguard for BoLD one-step proofs: if a proof accepts conflicting answers, settlement from Arbitrum One to Ethereum would pause while the issue is fixed, though the network itself would continue operating. No restoration timeline was announced.
