Cognition security chief says AI has broken the old cybersecurity order
Understand this story
Cognition Chief Security Officer Alex Stamos said on the Decoder podcast that open-weight models can already automate most parts of the attack chain, bringing attackers' marginal costs close to zero while defense costs remain high. He therefore judged that the long-standing asymmetry in attack and defense costs that cybersecurity has relied on is being broken, and the old order is becoming hard to maintain. The above remarks come from Stamos' statements on the podcast and are not independently verified test conclusions.
AI overview based on source reports · Updated 10 min ago
Coverage timeline
Follow the coverage to explore different perspectives.
- The Verge · AIAI broke the cybersecurity world. What’s next?
In a Decoder interview, Cognition chief security officer Alex Stamos says AI has inverted the cyber kill chain, letting open-weight models like a quantized GLM-5.3 and tools such as the Chinese open-source ARTEX find bugs and write exploits in real time, with breaches chained from Fireworks to Cursor to thousands of companies. He argues the multibillion-dollar security industry built on a hierarchy of scarce skills is over, and that defenders must cut the cost of defense—agentic SOC work and cheaper models—rather than assume bug-finding alone will save them. Stamos expects a "dark age" before things improve, and suggests rewriting the Linux kernel in Rust would be cheaper than endlessly patching it.
Activity for this story
Not enough continuous observations to show a trend yet.