“The internet's really been built for resilience, not necessarily for security. And I think that what we're going to see now is a moment where a lot of that debt, a lot of that tech debt is going to come to the surface. It's time for us to pay it down.”
No Priors · AI Research & Frontier Labs · October 2026
Brockman was explaining why AI-driven cyber capability is exposing long-standing weaknesses in software. He said OpenAI put about a quarter of its production engineers on hold to point its strongest model at its own infrastructure, and expects to repeat that with every new model.
Transcript
Yeah, right. I mean,
you can look at XKCD in the comic of like all the world's infrastructure reliant on like one open source project written by one dude in his basement, right? Or Heartblade or anything that predated like all these AI issues.
…got kind of bolted on, right? And we had high-profile incidents, right? You think about early worms and viruses. And then people started to realize, well, we need virus scanning software, right? And we need to have encryption for requests over HTTP should be over HTTPS. All of these mechanisms were ones where I think that we kind of took the slower route in order to add security on afterwards. The internet's really been built for resilience, not necessarily for security. And I think that what we're going to see now is a moment where a lot of that debt, a lot of that tech debt is going to come to the surface. It's time for us to pay it down. And that as a company, we are doing, we are really leaning into trying to help with this moment. So for example, we have a billion-dollar commitment that we've made to help frontline defenders get access to our models and utilize them. Defense that we're studying and trying to find different vulnerabilities out there and then thinking about how do we help the world respond? How do we coordinate…
like basically there's going to be a period of time where maybe we're going to see more of these cyber attacks, more incidents, et cetera, as humanity or as people sort of catch up in terms of their core bases getting more and more secure, using more AI-generated code that's sort of preset to be…
look, I have a lot of optimism about how we can navigate this moment. I think it does require a coordinated response, right? It really requires defenders to internalize how the physics of cybersecurity are changing, that there is this window where that window is not going to last forever, right?…
I think your example, I mean, your description of this is like, let's say, like internet-wide tech debt, and then your response to it internally is a really good one. Because I've been part of companies where tech debt is very painful to address. And to say, we're going to take 25% of the…
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