How Quickly Can AI Crack Your Password?

Your password might be strong, but is it AI-strong?

We used an AI-powered password cracker to test 14.2 million real-world passwords and find out how long it would take AI to crack them in 2025.

The results are shocking: 85.6% of common passwords can be cracked in under ten seconds.

So how safe are your passwords, really? Let’s take a look.

AI doesn't just guess passwords anymore; it is learning them. By training on millions of passwords leaked from real users, AI is now capable of identifying common patterns such as 'Password123' or 'Summer2025' a lot quicker than a human hacker ever could.

So, how long does it take an AI-powered system to crack passwords of different lengths and complexity?

Anything that is less than eight characters, no matter how complex, is essentially useless because AI can break those instantly. However, with each character added, the required time drastically increases, as it jumps from weeks to centuries to trillions of years as passwords increase in length and complexity.

AI-powered tools like PassGAN (Password Generative Adversarial Network) don’t rely on simple brute-force attacks. Instead, they learn from real leaked password databases — like the massive RockYou dataset — and recognize how people actually create passwords.

They notice habits like capitalizing the first letter, replacing “o” with “0,” or adding “!” at the end. This allows AI to predict likely passwords first, skipping millions of random guesses. Combined with modern GPUs capable of running billions of computations per second, AI can break weak passwords almost instantly.

The analysis revealed that 85.6% of common passwords are easily cracked by AI in less than ten seconds. Furthermore, that window of opportunity is short: 85.8% can be hacked within one minute, and almost 88% within one month.

The main reason for this is the use of short passwords. A six-character password consisting of letters and numbers with a few symbols provides little to no effective security. On the other hand, length is the crucial differentiating factor. A password with twelve characters could take hundreds of years to break, while one with sixteen or more takes the timeline into the trillions of years.

Complexity is still an issue, but not as much as people realize. A very strong password with full complexity (numbers, uppercase, lowercase, and symbols) could last a total of 27 years, whereas a password with only letters lasts in a mere three weeks. The most important notion to be taken away from this is simple: length is the real shield. Sixteen characters or more, and you are in the safety zone.

How to Stay Safe

You do not need to be a cybersecurity expert to protect yourself against AI password attacks. The best step is to use long, unique passwords (at least sixteen characters) that include multiple character types. A good strategy is to make a phrase into a password like CoffeeRainBlueSky42! (which is both a memorable and a strong password).

Even the strongest password is not perfect, as it may still be stolen in a data breach. That's why enabling 2FA or MFA is one of the best defenses you can utilize. It provides a second layer of protection, so even if someone gets your password, they still can't log in without the second step.

When logging in, you may be required to enter a single-use code from an application, accept a push notification, or insert a physical key. This means that even if a hacker does somehow get your password, they still can't get access to your account without that second factor.

While SMS codes are convenient, they're not foolproof: text messages can be easily intercepted or redirected. Authentication through an application or a hardware device provides much enhanced security, especially for a sensitive account.

To manage dozens of different passwords is nearly impossible on your own, but reusing the same password everywhere is an enormous risk. The best solution is a password manager that can securely create, store, and auto-fill strong passwords for all accounts.

Even with good habits, however, breaches happen. It's always a good practice to regularly check if your credentials have been exposed. You can easily do this safely using tools such as Have I Been Pwned. If your email is included in a breach:

• Change that password immediately.

• Don’t reuse it anywhere else.

AI has completely altered the speed at which passwords can be broken. What took hackers years can now take seconds with machine learning models trained on huge leaked-password datasets. Weak, short, or reused passwords are no longer just dangerous. Now, they are essentially just unlocked doors for AI-powered cracking machines.

Uku Tomikas, CEO of business messaging platform Messente, emphasized that these findings all point to a growing security gap that both individuals and businesses need to address:

While AI may be able to crack a weak password in seconds, it cannot defeat complex, well-designed security systems.

The data behind these findings comes from the updated RockYou 2024 dataset, one of the largest publicly available password collections. The UTF-8 text file was processed with Unicode NFKC normalization to standardize characters, and all whitespace and empty lines were removed. Passwords were filtered to include only those between 4 and 18 characters long.

Each password was then categorized into one of five groups: numbers only, lowercase letters, lowercase plus uppercase, numbers plus letters, and fully mixed combinations of numbers, uppercase, lowercase, and symbols. After cleaning and categorization, we worked with a final dataset of 14.2 million unique passwords.

Cracking time estimates were modeled using AI-assisted password generation (including PassGAN) combined with GPU-based brute-force simulations. The times assume access to modern consumer-grade hardware and real-world password generation patterns learned from publicly available leaks.