How Do AI Agents Change Cybersecurity?

Parag Agrawal thinks the cybersecurity risks are real and that agents help both defenders and attackers. People who rush ahead to adopt agents for defending themselves will be fine, because attackers like to find the weakest link and there will always be a weakest link. The security risk for something highly sensitive, like the model weights of a frontier model, is a whole different conversation.

By and large, his intuition is that coding agents will be used aggressively to secure, but along the way a cyber event of consequence is going to happen every few weeks. The events will drive action and urgency in getting ahead on defense, and a bunch of influence is going to be spent on both attack and defense.