Somewhere on the internet right now, a criminal is buying a ChatGPT Plus account for ten cents. That is less than a gumball, and it comes with a world-class research assistant for whatever crimes you have in mind. According to research shared first with Axios, the underground market for AI hacking tools has exploded, and the discount aisle is wide open.
From 50 Ads to 1,400 in Four Months
Here is the number that should make your stomach drop. Axios reports that advertisements for AI tools on underground forums and platforms surged from fewer than 50 per month in late 2025 to more than 1,400 by February. That comes from a report by Halcyon's Ransomware Research Center.
That is not a trend line. That is a vertical wall. Whatever the criminal underworld was doing with AI last fall, it has since decided to go all in, and the sellers are keeping up with the demand like it's Black Friday at a Best Buy.
The marketplace is not subtle about any of it. The ads are out there, the buyers are showing up, and business is clearly booming.
The Dime-Store Economy of Crime
Axios reports that sellers offered access to ChatGPT Plus accounts for as little as 10 cents. Read that again. A legitimate subscription costs real money every month, and the criminal bargain bin is practically handing them out.
We don't have the full picture of how those accounts end up for sale, and the excerpt of the reporting we have access to cuts off mid-sentence while describing other offerings, including something about jail. That is the kind of detail you want to see completed, but the thrust is already clear enough. Access to powerful AI is being sold like stolen loyalty points.
The pricing tells you everything about who the customer is. Nobody charges a dime for a product meant for a small circle of elite professionals. A dime is a price designed for volume.
Why Cheap Tools Make More Hackers
Axios lays out the real stakes in one tidy sentence. AI is making once-specialized hacking capabilities cheaper and easier to buy, potentially transforming far more criminals into dangerous hackers.
That is the part that matters. Hacking used to demand skill, patience, and years of obsessive tinkering. The barrier to entry kept the ranks thin. Now a mediocre crook with a few dollars and a poor attitude can rent the expertise instead of earning it.
Think of it like the difference between needing to learn how to forge a painting and being able to order a convincing fake online with next-day shipping. The talent bottleneck is gone. What's left is intent, and the underworld has never had a shortage of that.
The Ransomware Researchers Are Not Calm
The data comes from Halcyon, a company that studies ransomware for a living. Their Ransomware Research Center is the one tracking these forums, which means the people sounding the alarm are the ones who spend their days reading criminal classifieds.
That should land differently than a vague warning from a think tank. These are folks counting actual advertisements and watching the number multiply by roughly 28 in a few months. When the people paid to be calm start flagging a spike like that, you listen.
And ransomware is the exact kind of crime that scales well with cheap automation. Hospitals, school districts, and city governments do not get a vote on whether they become the target.
Nobody Is Minding the Store
Let's be honest about the broader context. The companies building these tools have spent years telling us about guardrails, safety teams, and responsible deployment. Meanwhile, the accounts are apparently circulating for pocket change in the digital equivalent of a back alley.
We should be careful here, because the reporting we have does not detail how these accounts are obtained or how many are legitimately compromised versus resold in other ways. But the existence of a thriving dime-a-pop market suggests that whatever controls are in place are not stopping the flow.
And Washington, for its part, has shown roughly the cyber-policy urgency of a man who just discovered email. Good luck waiting on a federal response.
The Dingo Take
Are we really still pretending that this technology can be released into the world with a polite terms-of-service agreement and a prayer? Because the criminal economy just answered that question with 1,400 ads a month. The people with the worst intentions adopted these tools faster than most of the people with good ones.
The lesson here is not that AI is evil. It's that every powerful tool gets priced down to the level of the lowest bidder, and the lowest bidder in this case is a ransomware crew with a grudge and a budget of ten cents. Cheap access is a feature for the companies and a gift for the criminals, and those two groups are now unintentionally in business together.
So what happens next is depressingly predictable. A hospital gets locked out of its own records, a city loses its water billing system, and somebody in a hoodie in a country with no extradition treaty gets rich off a tool that cost less than a vending machine pretzel. Everybody will act surprised. Nobody should be.
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