What Is the Defender's Window?

Greg Brockman says the defender's window is the current phase of cybersecurity, when peak frontier AI can help defenders secure their systems and the strongest capabilities are not broadly diffused yet. He says the physics of cybersecurity are changing. Cyber capabilities already available to everyone keep rising from model release to model release, from providers across the world.

The leading edges of impact are already showing up. In South Korea, high-profile hacks of banks were driven by different models. Brockman says defenders need to use the window while the strongest tools remain concentrated. Through the Daybreak program, he says his team has worked to give defenders responsible access to peak intelligence, or to very capable models, so they can find and fix vulnerabilities in their systems.

The flaws already existed in human-written code. Brockman says the way systems were built was fundamentally insecure, and people always knew it. He calls the issues human ones, from the way people chose to build the internet, with security bolted on after early worms and viruses pushed people toward virus scanning software.