Enterprises pay $100,000 a day for AI they never ordered

Publisher excerpt From CSO Online

Enterprises deploying large language models (LLMs) in production may be unknowingly footing the bill for someone else’s AI business. Google Threat Intelligence Group (GTIG) is warning of financially motivated LLMjacking campaigns in which cybercriminals hijack enterprise cloud and model access before reselling it through underground subscription services. The activity can generate fake cloud charges exceeding $100,000 in a single day, GTIG said in a blog post. In some incidents, cumulative charges reached $1 million before organizations revoked the compromised access. “LLM Mixers turn stolen enterprise model access into a service for paying customers, while the victim’s systems continue accepting requests through credentials they recognize,” said Piyush Sharma, co-founder and CEO at Tuskira. “That puts a lot of weight on the authority attached to each credential. A key issued for one application shouldn’t become a reusable pass to other models and workloads.” GTIG’s analysis is based on multiple incidents in 2026, spanning a variety of cloud and LLM providers across North America, South America, and Asia Pacific. Stolen model access becomes an underground business GTIG said the monetization infrastructure centers on LLM Mixers, criminal routing gateways that aggregate compromised API credentials and resell model access to underground subscribers. These services proxy requests across stolen accounts, distribute consumption and hide the original source of access. Multiple operations were identified using open-source gateways and custom relay infrastructure to pool stolen credentials. One threat actor, UNC6993, used tools including new-api and gcli2api to aggregate stolen keys and distribute requests across accounts. Another operation used stolen third-party API keys to power Jet Night, a legitimate token-routing service that executed more than 500,000 LLM API calls in under eight hours, GTIG said. The activity passed nearly $1 million in token costs to the victim organization. Jet Night advertises unlimited access to frontier models for approximately $60 a month, substantially lower than the typical cost of comparable legitimate access. Jet Night also experienced occasional outages that GTIG suspects were caused by victims discovering compromises and revoking keys. “Selling stolen model access gives criminals a reason to keep that access working for as long as possible, which makes the quiet activity before the spending spike especially important,” said Nick Tausek, lead security automation architect at Swimlane. “By the time someone asks why the cloud bill has exploded, the attacker may already have paying customers.” The attack begins long before the bill arrives Initial access involves exposed or stolen cloud identity tokens, including IAM credentials, service account keys, GitHub personal access tokens, and active session tokens, GTIG pointed out. Attackers also harvest LLM API keys from public repositories and scan for exposed mode…

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