“As soon as you pause, they go, well, thank God that problem's solved. And they will wait until we unpause and then they'll go, oh my God, there's a threat again. The urgency is not going to be felt.”
Galaxy Brain · October 2026
The host asks whether pausing AI development would give people time to fix the outdated security that much of the internet runs on. Corman says it wouldn't, and that the larger risk is attackers using models nobody can pause, so the only option is to start fixing security now.
Transcript
From Rethink, the creative marketing studio at The Atlantic and Walmart, On Solid Ground is a new podcast exploring the increasing threat of natural disasters. I'm journalist Caroline Modoressi-Tarani, and I spoke with those on the front lines of disaster response to understand how communities build resilience before, during, and after a storm. Listen to On Solid Ground wherever you get your podcasts.
I want to get into the actual specifics of where do we go from here in terms of actual cybersecurity? What are some of these things? But first, before we do that, I want to ask, something you brought up earlier is this idea too, of these agents hacking some of these government websites and some of these places where the security practices are actually very bad there, right? Like this information that they're able to find because they're these persistent agents, but it is kind of just out there and people just have these lax or outdated security. A lot of the internet is built off of that type of stuff, stuff that just hasn't been maintained. It seems to me like a very real fear that. You know, if we don't pause any of this stuff, if we don't give anyone time, like, is there a reason for a pause, I guess, to just allow people to update their stuff just to make sure that, like, cause like we now have a threat that is that is persistent in ways that just like, you know, human beings might not be.
The problem is, is that as soon as you pause, they go, well, thank God that problem's solved. And they will wait until we unpause and then they'll go, oh my God, there's a threat again. The urgency is not going to be felt. Okay. But secondly, pausing, I mean, we're not that worried actually about the frontier models like OpenAI and Anthropic hacking all of these systems. That is like we can handle that through some pretty decent legal consequences. The bigger risk is that like threat actors use AI models, including ones from China, that we don't have any control over whether we pause them or not. And that those people and systems might lead to hacking these things. So deciding to pace the frontier is not going to solve that. Our only option is to go push forward today to start fixing our cybersecurity problems. Like that is where I think we need to focus. And that's where I want the public's like concern to be. It's like intelligence explosion, I'll take that chance compared to the actual risk you're pointing to, which is real. And the solution is to go fix it today. Right.
You recently said, I need more names in cybersecurity to come forward, state the obvious that cybersecurity is real, it works. And yes, we can absolutely contain an AI, even if it's extremely good. So yeah, make the case of how we do that.
It's kind of one of these like religious things of like, it's kind of like I have to prove we've never had an AI we cannot contain. Okay. We have AIs that we have failed to contain through, like I said, negligence. But like, I think they even had, I forget who did it. It might have been Prime Intellect or someone. They just ran like a huge eval job on trying to break out of Firecracker VMs and like they failed. They did none of the models broke out. Okay. Can
you explain what that means to people who