The AI hacking apocalypse is not inevitable - CyberScoop

"The AI hacking apocalypse is not inevitable" is the rare headline that means to soothe you and instead reveals exactly how low the bar has been set. Not inevitable. Nobody ever promised inevitable. "You probably won't be mauled by a badger" is also not inevitable, and we still shut the gate. CyberScoop has convened cybersecurity professionals to confirm that frontier-model AI agents hacking onto the open internet are, in the excerpt's words, "worth taking seriously" — the phrase you deploy when you want credit for vigilance without committing to a single number, date or incident.

The load-bearing quote belongs to Juan Andrés Guerrero-Saade, vice president of threat intelligence at SentinelOne and an adjunct professor at Johns Hopkins University: "what we see is cybersecurity being used essentially as an excuse for these AI doomer arguments." He is right, and the racket deserves naming — two years of conference keynotes in which a man with a lanyard explains that the model will end civilisation, followed by a coffee break and a vendor booth. The delicious wrinkle is that the man calling out the doomer business is himself a threat-intelligence executive at a security company, a job that only exists because threats keep turning up. Everyone at this party is on somebody's payroll, which is not a scandal; it is simply worth remembering whenever the word "apocalypse" is doing the marketing.

Note what is being defended: not the models, but the genre. "Far from inevitable" is an unfalsifiable comfort — inevitable was never the offer, so well done on declining a thing nobody proposed. Meanwhile the rules the EFF asked lawmakers to ground in incidents that have actually happened stay a wishlist, while the airtime goes to whoever has the better doom voice. The apocalypse is not inevitable. Neither, on this evidence, is a straight answer.