In this paper, we examine the algebraic XSL attack on the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES). We begin with a brief introduction and we present an overview of AES, then, in Section 3, we present the algebraic attack on ciphers like AES, following with the XL and XSL algorithms in Section 4 and Section 5. Then, we present the XSL first and second attacks, also their aplicability on BES. We see how and if the algorithm has been improved since it firstly appeared. We conclude with Section 10