The CTF scene is dead
The author, a seasoned CTF competitor, argues that the competitive integrity of open Capture The Flag (CTF) events has been undermined by advances in frontier AI models. Tools like Claude Opus 4.5 and GPT-5.5 can now solve medium to hard challenges autonomously, shifting competition from human skill to AI orchestration. As a result, CTF leaderboards no longer reflect pure cybersecurity ability, and the format's value for recruitment and challenge design is diminishing.
- ▪Frontier AI models like GPT-5.5 and Claude Opus 4.5 can autonomously solve medium to hard CTF challenges, including Insane difficulty pwn challenges.
- ▪The use of AI agents connected via CLI and CTFd API has made early challenge solves trivial, favoring automation over human skill.
- ▪CTFTime rankings have become less reflective of human ability, as success increasingly depends on access to expensive AI models and token budgets.
- ▪Challenge creators are less incentivized to design intricate problems if AI can solve them within minutes of release.
- ▪Open CTFs have effectively become 'pay-to-win' competitions where performance correlates more with AI resource allocation than cybersecurity expertise.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
← BlogOpinion / May 1, 2026The CTF scene is dead.Frontier AI has broken the open CTF format. The scoreboard does not measure human skill cleanly anymore, and the old game is not coming back.What makes me qualified to say this?I started playing CTFs in 2021, the same year I started university. My first CTF was HCKSYD, a 48-hour solo CTF. I full solved it and won in 2 hours. I was completely hooked. That led me to win DownUnderCTF, Australia's largest CTF, with Blitzkrieg multiple times. Blitzkrieg was one of Australia's strongest teams at the time. I later joined TheHackersCrew, an international top-tier team that was consistently ranked highly on CTFTime, the main global ranking and event calendar the scene uses as its scoreboard.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Kabir.
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