A systematic literature review of large language models in phishing attack generation and detection

Phishing attacks continue to grow in scale and sophistication, causing substantial financial losses and privacy breaches worldwide. Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have brought significant changes to the generation and detection of phishing content. This study systematically investigates the dual role of LLMs in facilitating phishing attacks and strengthening countermeasures. Using the PRISMA methodology, authors screened 142 records published between January 2023 and April 2025 and identified 36 eligible studies from major academic databases, including IEEE Xplore, ScienceDirect, ACM Digital Library, Web of Science, and Scopus. A comprehensive and rigorous analysis was conducted of research trends/themes over time, dataset characteristics, and the LLM architectures/models employed. The findings reveal that most studies relied on manually generated datasets rather than publicly available benchmark datasets, and that GPT-based models received considerably more attention than other LLM architectures. The review demonstrates that LLMs substantially enhance the generation of phishing content by producing coherent, contextually relevant, and persuasive email and website content. This capability lowers the technical barrier for attackers and potentially increases attack effectiveness. Conversely, LLMs also strengthen defensive strategies by enabling more effective analysis of textual and visual content for phishing detection. In many cases, LLM-based approaches outperform traditional machine learning and deep learning methods and, in certain contexts, approach or match human-level performance. Overall, the findings suggest that LLMs have accelerated and automated phishing-related processes, simultaneously intensifying the threat landscape and advancing defensive capabilities. • The first in-depth study to review LLMs usage in Phishing attack generation and detection. • The study reveals LLMs have accelerated and automated phishing-related processes, elevating both threats and defence mechanisms. • GenAI-based multimodal phishing attacks are on the rise due to the wider adoption of GenAI tools in general.