AI Now Outsmarts Humans in Spear Phishing, Analysis Shows

We knew it was coming and now it is here: AI-powered spear phishing now outperforms elite human-generated spear phishing, with the real inflection point occurring in early 2025. If we add AI’s ability to operate at vastly improved speed and scale, the outlook for AI-assisted social engineering is daunting. 

Since 2023, Hoxhunt has run ongoing experiments pitting AI-generated spear phishing against expert red team generated spear phishing; and has found a 55% improvement in AI performance. In 2023, when the experiment started, AI was 31% less effective than humans. By March 2025, it was 24% more effective. (Effectiveness is measured by the number of times the spear phishes succeeded in getting the target to ‘click’.)

The 2023 results were similar to those returned by a separate study conducted by IBM’s X-Force Red, also in 2023. The IBM study found a human phish achieved a 14% click rate against ...