AI-powered malware is closer than expected, as the first known ransomware family to rely on AI systems for local operations has been discovered. According to ESET, which discovered the threat, the AI-powered ransomware is only proof-of-concept (PoC) or work-in-progress for now, but appears to be designed with all the functionality of traditional ransomware. Dubbed PromptLock, the malware is written in GoLang and relies on OpenAI’s GPT-OSS:20b, an open-weight model that can be used without proprietary restrictions. The threat, ESET explains in a series of posts on social media, relies on hard-coded prompts to generate Lua scripts on the fly, and uses these scripts to perform operations such as filesystem enumeration, file inspection, data exfiltration, and encryption. Both Windows and…