Unit 42’s top brass has seen enough from internal frontier AI model testing and malicious in-the-wild use of commercially available AI tools to be genuinely concerned.
“I can tell you without exaggeration that we believe that this is a generational shift in cybersecurity,” Sam Rubin, senior vice president of Palo Alto Networks’ threat intelligence arm, said in a media briefing Wednesday.
A period of relative balance between security and exposure has been broken by frontier AI model capabilities that could allow attackers to find and exploit network weaknesses with speed, Rubin said.
Unit 42 warned that capabilities demonstrated by readily available agentic AI models, and those unlocked by frontier AI models that remain gated for defense, have shifted the balance of power from defenders to attackers.
“The defenses that we’ve had built up over years weren’t necessarily built for or prepared for these machine-speed attacks,” Rubin said. “Organizations are ill-equipped to detect and to respond quickly in the face of these attacks.
Back in April, when Anthropic brought Palo Alto Networks and other major technology companies together to form Project Glasswing, an initiative to find and address security defects with its Mythos model, Unit 42 estimated the same capabilities would be in the hands of attackers within a year.