Whether initiated by nation-states, criminals, hacktivists, or disgruntled individuals, attacks have always been asymmetric. In other words, all the attacker has to do is find one flaw to use as an entry point. Defenders have always had to defend against everything.

While assaults like denial-of-service attacks could run at machine speed, the capability to create and deploy attacks was always limited by humans' ability to find exploits and design attacks. Likewise, the defenders could initiate automated defenses, such as firewalls. However, attack mitigation had to be done by people with discernment so they could add protections and respond without breaking systems.

Also: Give your 'human-level agents' a proper head start with these 3 best practices

AI changes all of that. Enemy actors can use enormously powerful large language models to identify vulnerabilities and deploy attacks at electron speed. By using parallel agents, they can even do so with enormous digital armies of attackers, all running at speeds well beyond the powers and abilities of mortal humans.