A $90 Key into Your Company's Secrets

The cost of an AI-driven break-in into a simulated corporate network fell 99% in five months, from a $5,000–$10,000 BIS estimate in April to about $90 with Zhipu's open-weight GLM-5.3, and Goldman executives have discussed spending as much or more on AI for security as on AI coding tools. The piece argues attackers now optimize expected value on compute and concentrate on the largest targets, while defenders must inspect every alert and face compounding speed, scale and breadth multipliers, including a July 2026 Hugging Face intrusion by roughly 700 coordinated agents. The CISO's task becomes maximizing the efficiency of the security stack to push the attacker's expected value below zero.