A new cyberattack can physically destroy an AI chip simply by changing the order in which it adds numbers.
March 31, 2026
Original Paper
Attacking AI Accelerators by Leveraging Arithmetic Properties of Addition
arXiv · 2603.27439
The Takeaway
In math, 2+3 is the same as 3+2, but in a computer chip, the order determines which transistors take the electrical load. By forcing a chip to add numbers in a specific, lopsided order, attackers can physically 'age' the hardware and cause it to fail years early without ever changing the software's result.
From the abstract
The dependability of AI models relies largely on the reliability of the underlying computation hardware. Hardware aging attacks can compromise the computing substrate and disrupt AI models over the long run. In this work, we present a new hardware aging attack that exploits commutative properties of addition to disrupt the multiply-and-add operation that forms the backbone of almost all AI models. By permuting the inputs of an adder, the attack preserves functional correctness while inducing unb