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AS Alex Stamos On Galaxy Brain

“Certainly what we're doing right now is not working. I think it's total malpractice to write anything in C and C++. Any company that is shipping code that is written in C in 2027 is, from my perspective, just completely inappropriate.”

Galaxy Brain · October 2026

“Certainly what we're doing right now is not working. I think it's total malpractice to write anything in C and C++. Any company that is shipping code that is written in C in 2027 is, from my perspective, just completely inappropriate.” — Alex Stamos, Galaxy Brain

Context

Charlie Warzel asked whether rewriting software would just produce new bugs for stronger AI models to find. Stamos says no: languages that rule out whole classes of bugs, plus some formal verification, make that much less likely. The transcript renders "C++" as "C".

Transcript

Galaxy Brain Around 19:24 into the episode
Speaker 2

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Charlie Warzel

…code. Do we just end up, if we do that, in the same situation later when more powerful AI models find these new vulnerabilities or that the code is, you know, allows for these like superhuman style bugs that we, you know, we are incapable of kind of comprehending? Is that a possible scenario?

Alex Stamos

I don't think so. I mean, one, I mean, it's hard. Like now we're getting to like metaphysics when you talk about like these superhuman capabilities. But I don't think so. I think if we start rebuilding things using languages that eliminate these entire classes and then you start using some level of formalism, then it's much, much, much less likely that that's true. Certainly what we're doing right now is not working. Right. I think it's total malpractice to write anything in C and C. Any company that is shipping code that is written in C in 2027 is, from my perspective, that is just completely inappropriate.

Charlie Warzel

And for the people listening who aren't as familiar, the reason for that is just because it's an old, outdated language. And you don't want to have your systems be running off diag. It's easier to exploit all that, right?

Alex Stamos

Right, because the language C and C, these are languages from the 1980s, 70s, actually, and 1980s. And in fact, in the original book for the C programming language, which I was taught at Berkeley out of this book, in the original printing, there was a security flaw in the book that was written by…

Charlie Warzel

that. So let's talk about that. You obviously mentioned like power grid systems, some of this very foundational infrastructure running off of some of this old stuff. We need to do something about it. You also said early on that people are overwhelmed, right? That there's so much happening. Do we…

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.

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