Kriminal: The $12.99-a-Month Criminal AI Service That Piggybacks on Grok and Claude
A new service called Kriminal sells access to leading AI models with their safety restrictions stripped out, packaging hacking tools, fake-identity generation and financial tracing into subscription tiers that start cheaper than a streaming service.
Key points
- Kriminal charges as little as $12.99 a month for access to AI tools with their safety guardrails bypassed, with a top tier costing $99 a month.
- The service routes requests through legitimate providers including xAI's Grok and Anthropic's Claude, then uses jailbreak prompts (special instructions that trick an AI into ignoring its own rules) to remove restrictions.
- Kriminal is listed on Google, hosted on Google Cloud and Cloudflare, and accepts payment in cryptocurrency through a third-party checkout provider.
- Its premium tier includes four named AI agents built for exploit research, financial tracing, document analysis and fake-identity construction.
- Researchers at ThreatDown confirmed many findings by asking the service directly, and it answered honestly about its own purpose.
A criminal subscription service called Kriminal is offering anyone with a credit card and some cryptocurrency access to powerful AI tools with their built-in safety rules removed. Pricing starts at $12.99 a month, it's listed on Google, and it looks like any other software product. We first covered Kriminal on 19 August 2026, when researchers noted how its reliance on mainstream providers makes it difficult to shut down.
ThreatDown, the security research arm of Malwarebytes, shared its findings with CSO Online ahead of publication this week. What they found was less a secret criminal AI than a clever reseller operation.
How does Kriminal actually work?
Kriminal doesn't run its own AI. It buys access to established models and layers jailbreak prompts over them. A jailbreak prompt is a set of instructions slipped into a conversation that tells an AI to ignore its own guidelines, switching off the filters that stop it from writing malware or coaching someone through fraud.
The service's own code names xAI's Grok as its main engine. OpenRouter provides access to models including Mistral Large and Meta's Llama 3.3. Anthropic's Claude handles long-document analysis. A fourth tool, Tavily, supplies live web search. None of those providers built Kriminal; they're simply the infrastructure it rents and re-sells at a markup.
When researchers asked the service which AI it was, it identified itself as Grok. That matched the provider code they'd already found.
What can paying subscribers actually do with it?
The four premium AI agents, available on the top $99 "GHOST" tier, divide the work between them.
| Agent name | Stated purpose |
|---|---|
| PHANTUM | Financial tracing and asset investigation |
| ARCHITECT | Exploit research and offensive code writing |
| ORACLE | Document and intelligence analysis |
| WRAITH | Social engineering, fake personas, identity construction |
Social engineering means psychologically manipulating people into giving away passwords or money, often through convincing impersonation. Lower paid tiers, starting at $12.99, offer between 200 and 1,800 messages a month alongside unrestricted code generation and an in-browser coding environment.
Should ordinary people be worried?
Directly, probably not. Kriminal is aimed at people who want to run phishing campaigns or trace financial accounts, not at individuals browsing the web.
The real concern is what services like this do to the cost of crime. Aviv Nahum, co-founder and CEO of Above Security, told CSO Online: "The underlying capability is becoming a commodity. Organizations cannot outsource their security strategy to the guardrails of AI providers."
The safety filters built into mainstream AI are useful but not a wall. Anyone willing to pay $12.99 can now route around them. Diana Kelley, Chief Information Security Officer at Noma Security, told CSO Online the service is "a bellwether for a broader shift in cyber offense" as offensive capability becomes cheaper and faster to deploy.
If you receive an unusually persuasive email, or a message asking you to transfer money, be sceptical. Verify requests through a separate channel before acting.
