Cybersecurity leaders are now AI's voice of calm

What they're saying: "There's been too much conversation around the perils of AI lately," Palo Alto Networks CEO Nikesh Arora told Axios. "People should take a much more positive outlook towards it."

• "Yes, it has issues around safety, it has issues around security, it's a nascent technology," he added. "We should be building a mechanism to try and make it work."

Reality check: Cybersecurity experts aren't dismissing the underlying risks.

• Researchers at OpenAI, Anthropic and elsewhere are investigating tens of thousands of cases where frontier models went outside the bounds of their pre-deployment tests, Axios recently reported.

• Just last week, OpenAI's models tried to hack an Australian health service website and accessed some U.S. government websites while trying to complete their tasks.

Zoom in: Zack Korman, CEO of Embroidery, told Axios that he's spending much of his time trying to direct people's energy toward the real, tangible security risks posed by AI agents, rather than the vague but existential ones.

• "If you focus so much attention on the extinction risk, you actually make all of the real risks worse," he said.
• Korman has gone from publicly urging cyber experts to take AI risks more seriously to pushing back on AI doomsday predictions that he says distract people from doing real work to prepare.
• Korman is among a chorus of veteran cyber experts publicly rebutting the idea that AI-driven threats are going to end the world — or, at least, destroy the internet.
• The issue has become so salient that Ciaran Martin, founder of the UK's National Cyber Security Centre, has coined a new phrase: "Calm the FUD down," referring to the common security acronym "fear, uncertainty and doubt."

The big picture: Warnings from prominent AI figures have grown dire in recent weeks.

• A former Anthropic and OpenAI researcher declared this month that AI could "kill us all by the end of the decade."
• Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei warned of AI agents creating a botnet that takes over the internet, while OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has outlined two ways AI progress could go "very badly," including if humans lose control of AI.

Flashback: Ever since Anthropic held back the release of Mythos Preview due to its cyber capabilities, cybersecurity leaders have found themselves assuming the role of the calmest voice in the room — after decades of trying to get executives to take security risks seriously.

• "It is more or less the first moment the vast majority of the AI space ever thought about cybersecurity ever," Korman said about the Mythos release.

Case in point: John Peterson, chief technology officer at Sophos, told Axios that a lot of his company's conversations with customers focus on doing basic cyber hygiene, such as adding identity controls or turning on multifactor authentication.

• "What we need the industry to take to heart is that doing the basics right is still the most important thing," Peterson said.

The bottom line: Cybersecurity experts' biggest challenge now is keeping people from panicking as they finally learn about the digital risks experts have spent years warning about.

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