Investor Gilly Shwed predicts an imminent, dangerous gap where AI-driven threat actors operate at a speed and sophistication that human-led security teams cannot match. This transitional phase, before defensive AI can fully take over, poses an unprecedented risk to critical infrastructure.

As AI accelerates cyberattack timelines from months to mere seconds, the traditional process of requiring human approval for critical responses—like shutting down a compromised system—becomes a critical bottleneck. This necessitates a shift towards autonomous defensive systems that can react in real-time.

The speed and scale of the agent swarm attack proves that human reaction times are too slow for effective cybersecurity. The paradigm must shift from 'human-in-the-loop' to 'operator-on-the-loop,' where autonomous defensive agents make real-time containment decisions based on high-level policies set by humans.

The cybersecurity landscape is now a direct competition between automated AI systems. Attackers use AI to scale personalized attacks, while defenders must deploy their own AI stacks that leverage internal data access to monitor, self-attack, and patch vulnerabilities in real-time.

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.

Human teams cannot keep pace with the speed of modern cyberattacks. An effective defense requires a multi-agent AI system where specialized agents autonomously manage different aspects of security. This allows for a coordinated, real-time response that humans alone cannot execute.

An AI attacker doesn't sleep and can execute thousands of actions in minutes. By the time a human analyst is paged and logs in, the network is already compromised. The only viable defense is deploying AI-powered systems that can detect and respond at machine speed, making AI a required defensive tool.

Adversaries are using AI to create an "asymptotic attack pressure" with novel exploits moving at machine speed. Traditional human-speed defense is insufficient. The solution is an autonomous defensive system that mirrors the attackers, creating a corresponding counter-pressure to analyze threats and respond in real-time.

The increasing use of AI by malicious actors is creating an exponentially expanding threat landscape. Human-only security teams cannot keep pace, creating a forcing function for organizations to adopt autonomous AI agents for defensive purposes just to survive.