Geoffrey Hinton told BBC Newsnight that a 10 percent chance of AI killing all of us within a decade is “not unreasonable.” Yesterday he briefed senators alongside two AI researchers at Bernie Sanders’ invitation on the “extraordinary dangers” AI poses to humanity, then told reporters Congress has maybe a year. My test for how much anyone believes those numbers: who is cashing out their IRAs? I’m not. You’re not. If nobody is cashing out, we believe in a better future than we admit. I call myself an apocaloptimist (borrowed from the AI Doc movie), and I want to bring this conversation down from Skynet versus curing cancer and back to the work in front of us. Our grandparents lived with the certainty that a bomb could fall on them any afternoon. The danger was not imaginary, and the feared outcome was not inevitable. Every technology shift has brought harm and good at the same time: television, the car, the internet. That last one invented my entire field of cybersecurity along the way. Focus on one side only and you build a self-fulfilling prophecy. The risk is not zero, but catastrophe is not a foregone conclusion. I do not think cybersecurity’s job is to predict whether humanity exists in five years. Our job is to secure what is already here. AI safety and cybersecurity are different jobs that look identical when described badly. Explaining the difference is on us. AI safety teaches the teenager the rules of the road. Cybersecurity makes sure the seatbelts work, the engine runs, and the brake pads are there. AI security needs both. The only way to guarantee the teenager never crashes is to never let them drive. (Our field’s old joke about burying the computer at the bottom of the ocean has the same flaw: perfectly secure, perfectly useless.) Preventing AI use is not an answer. Safety researchers, security practitioners, forensic investigators, incident responders, governance leaders, and operators all belong at the same table. Right now they are not. Yesterday's briefing had three AI risk researchers. The labs do better but not by enough. Pacing what comes next does not secure what is already here. While we argued over Dario Amodei’s “We Must Pace the Frontier” letter, Anthropic’s own Sept. 10 threat report got buried. Agent swarms, a Russia-linked espionage campaign, all observed and disrupted, with IOCs you can download and hunt with today. I know which document deserves the afternoon. When people ask whether AI is going to take out humanity, my opinion is worth what everyone else’s is: nothing, percentages included. This field has handled every ugly thing the internet produced, and nobody handed us a probability of success first. Ask me again in a decade. I plan on being here to answer.

GTIG Q2 AI Threat Tracker published yesterday: in each of the cases, the attacker contributed intent and a few hours. Everything else, we built, published, and encouraged people to adopt. We spent two years arguing about whether AI could really hack anything, which is a fair discussion, because the evidence isn’t there for fully autonomous attacks in the wild. While that argument was going on, we handed every engineering team on the planet a set of AI agents that run commands, read configuration files nobody monitors, and sit next to credentials stored in plaintext. We shipped all of it without a security model, because it arrived labeled as developer productivity rather than as remote code execution with better branding. The most practical finding in the report is also the least dramatic: Your agent configuration directory is an execution path, and nothing you own is watching it. A credential stealer behind several open-source supply chain compromises this year drops its files into the hidden project folders that AI coding assistants create, meaning .claude, .vscode, and .cursor. Folders that AI tools manage and parse let malware blend into ordinary developer noise, well away from the places endpoint tools actually watch, like registry keys and cron. The dropped files create startup commands, so the malware runs whenever the IDE opens the workspace. A North Korean group is running the same play from a different angle, poisoning repository configurations and altering the assistant’s own startup hooks so a backdoor fires the moment a developer opens the project. A few more angles, and yes, Monday morning suggestions in comments

Introducing the "Official AI Cybersecurity Overused Phrase Bingo Cards" - from phrases most used in the last month on LinkedIn, Hacker Summer Camp, and in the news. Survive your AI Cybersecurity Meetings with just a bit more fun! Extra points if you yell "Bingo!" on a live teams/zoom meeting! Curious - what phrases did I miss? Might as well ask - this could be interesting. Comment below.