Cognition taps Alex Stamos to lead security efforts

Driving the news: Stamos told Axios he's joining Cognition to not only help defend the company from cyberattacks, but also to help it ship new security products.

• Cognition is the maker of Devin, an autonomous AI software engineering tool that can write and ship code, debug programs, run commands and more. Customers include Mercedes-Benz, the U.S. Army and AT&T.

• Most recently he oversaw security at AI security startup Corridor and SentinelOne.

The big picture: Stamos predicts that the next three to five years will "probably be the most important in the history of cybersecurity" as AI advancements dramatically change the threat landscape.

• Most companies, he said, are obsessed with Anthropic's Mythos models and their cyber capabilities, but throwing frontier models at bad code is often too expensive and won't fix underlying security problems.

Between the lines: By joining Cognition, Stamos wants to focus on solutions that most organizations can actually afford, while tackling the legacy software and technical debt that have long undermined their defenses.

What to watch: Stamos teased that Cognition is eyeing new security products that automate the secure software development lifecycle, including tools to rewrite legacy code in older enterprise software stacks into modern, containerized architectures.