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The shift to machine-versus-machine cyber warfare renders all human-written legacy software fundamentally insecure. This will trigger a global imperative to rewrite the world's operational software, not just for efficiency but for survival, with machines doing most of the coding to create impregnable systems.

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The core open-source belief that enough human experts will find all bugs is invalidated by AI discovering decades-old vulnerabilities in widely scrutinized code. This proves that high-level machine analysis is now essential for security, as human review alone is insufficient.

AI will find vulnerabilities at an unprecedented rate. The real crisis will be the organizational inability to patch them, especially in critical infrastructure with long update cycles and unsupported software where original developers are long gone. The problem shifts from finding flaws to fixing them at scale.

The same AI technology amplifying cyber threats can also generate highly secure, formally verified code. This presents a historic opportunity for a society-wide effort to replace vulnerable legacy software in critical infrastructure, leading to a durable reduction in cyber risk. The main challenge is creating the motivation for this massive undertaking.

Advanced AI cyber tools like Anthropic's Mythos don't create new vulnerabilities; they excel at discovering existing, dormant bugs in human-written code. Their proliferation will catalyze a one-time, industry-wide upgrade cycle, ultimately hardening global infrastructure and leading to a more secure equilibrium between AI-powered offense and defense.

Kevin Mandia predicts that within two years, all cyberattacks will be AI-driven. The sheer speed of these threats makes human-in-the-loop defense obsolete. The only viable response is a fully autonomous, AI-powered defensive system to counter AI-born threats.

AI models can now operate across the entire software stack, from assembly to TypeScript. This ability to 'talk to the metal' removes many intermediary code layers, rendering obsolete the security models built around managing dependencies within those layers.

The emergence of AI that can easily expose software vulnerabilities may end the era of rapid, security-last development ('vibe coding'). Companies will be forced to shift resources, potentially spending over 50% of their token budgets on hardening systems before shipping products.

The long-term trajectory for AI in cybersecurity might heavily favor defenders. If AI-powered vulnerability scanners become powerful enough to be integrated into coding environments, they could prevent insecure code from ever being deployed, creating a "defense-dominant" world.

While AI will increase cyber risk by enabling faster vulnerability scanning and generating potentially insecure code, it will also be the solution. AI agents will be needed to review code and defend systems, creating a massive new market for "agentic security" companies.

The traditional cybersecurity model of humans finding and patching vulnerabilities cannot keep pace with AI that discovers thousands of exploits in hours. This fundamental mismatch in speed and scale will require a complete overhaul of how software security is managed.

All Legacy Software Must Be Rewritten by AI to Eliminate Human-Made Security Flaws | RiffOn