Arbitrum Pauses New Stylus Activations Following AI-Assisted Attack Threats

Arbitrum's Security Council initiated an October 2 emergency action to block new Stylus contract activations across the Arbitrum One and Nova networks. The intervention targets increasingly sophisticated AI-assisted attacks that rely on hand-crafted WebAssembly programs generated entirely outside the standard Stylus compiler. While the bugs pose serious chain liveness and denial-of-service risks, Arbitrum confirmed no user funds were compromised during the exploit attempts. The network executed the pause around 15:30 UTC without an ArbOS upgrade by simply raising the Stylus activation gas requirement to an economically prohibitive threshold. A secondary safeguard was simultaneously deployed for BoLD's one-step proofs, which will automatically delay unconfirmed Ethereum withdrawals if conflicting proofs are ever accepted.