The past few weeks have “felt very strange” for Juan Andres Guerrero-Saade.
Like many, he is trying to sort through the spate of frontier-model AI agents from OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta and others hacking their way onto the open internet over the past few months, particularly amid the already-heated national debate around the emerging technology and its impact on society.
Guerrero-Saade, vice president of threat intelligence at SentinelOne and an adjunct professor at Johns Hopkins University, said the hacks are worth taking seriously, but at a time when businesses and open-source maintainers should be focused on further hardening their systems and policymakers should be discussing new solutions, “what we see is cybersecurity being used essentially as an excuse for these AI doomer arguments.”
The incidents have spawned those “doomer arguments” amid an intense public debate about the technology, the pace of industry development, and whether government and the private sector are doing enough to protect against “doomsday”-type scenarios, where AI systems take over or attack large parts of the internet or society.
Guerrero-Saade is among a growing chorus of cybersecurity professionals who say that while AI systems pose real, unique threats to our systems, the apocalypse is far from inevitable. Most of the public concerns around the incidents, let alone worries about killer AIs attacking critical infrastructure, assuming control of the internet and wiping out humanity, are either technically impossible or can largely be controlled through established cybersecurity principles.
There is this “narrative or magical thinking of ‘Well, AI is going to be able to hack everything, and therefore it can control everything, and therefore it’s going to kill us all,’” he told CyberScoop. “And you [think] these just don’t add up. They’re not very well-reasoned arguments.”
This fatalistic narrative tied to AI’s eventual dominance doesn’t hold up under scrutiny, according to experts CyberScoop spoke with. In recent conversations, cybersecurity and national security professionals raised questions about both the technical solutions OpenAI and Anthropic use to contain their models, as well as the glaring absence of federal oversight from federal regulators or truly independent third-party review.
For example, Jacob Coxon, an Anthropic employee who resigned over AI safety concerns, told CBS News that frontier models could not be “unplugged” by humans once deployed because the model would copy itself to thousands of other computers connected to the internet.
By contrast, Matt Tait, a former information security specialist at UK signals intelligence agency Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), pointed out that the models run by Anthropic and other frontier companies require extremely expensive, “ultraspecialist” machines that “are functionally supercomputers.”
“There is a zero chance that Anthropic’s most capable models will be able to extract their own model and run in the wild, because those supercomputers essentially only exist in datacenters,” Tait said.