AWS and Cloudflare is also two of the largest targets out there. They would already be subject to a lot of attacks from human bad actors.

I think the talk about AI attacks are very overhyped, both by the AI companies that want to hype how intelligent and powerful their models are, but also by Anti-AI people who will look for any argument against AI

In the end though the hacks by AI is not doing anything that a motivated human attacker couldn’t do. It just makes it more effective to do wide scans of vulnerable targets, but in the end it’s mainly just finding un-patched systems and correlating known exploits.

This is from the leak last year. What leaked was pictures uploaded to their ticket system to appeal the result of a failed verification.

The big problem you’ll run into is that it’s very likely outgoing connections to port 25 is blocked. In my experience it’s very uncommon that residential ISPs allow it, and even most VPS providers will block it unless you request access. So you’ll most likely need some form of relay anyway, and at that point you may as well send directly to the relay.