Sam Altman: The future of cybersecurity is AI defending AI

This article summarizes an episode of OpenAI’s video series featuring its co-founder, Sam Altman.

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Building AI that millions of people use every day requires changing how the world handles software security. Sam Altman, co-founder and CEO of OpenAI, warns that the old method of trying to lock away a few powerful systems is outdated.

He notes that the market is now filled with many different tools, forcing a shift away from running safety tests inside closed labs.

To keep society safe, Altman believes developers must use AI as the primary tool for global defense. By adopting this strategy, teams can stop trying to prevent every possible harm and instead help the world automatically defend itself against new dangers.

A new approach to digital safety

Trying to monitor and control every single piece of software is impossible in a market crowded with both open and closed systems. Early safety models incorrectly assumed that society would only ever need to manage a handful of highly restricted programs locked inside corporate facilities.

Altman explains that this narrow view fails to capture the current reality of widespread technology, observing, “The picture [of AI safety] now is actually more stable but more complex.”

Moving beyond single-company control
Instead of trying to keep one specific program trapped in a testing environment, society must prepare for a landscape where automated tools operate everywhere. It is no longer practical to rely on one single company to guarantee public safety or catch every potential error.

Therefore, governments and businesses must accept this rapid spread of technology and work together to manage the complex new environment.

This is because distributing the responsibility for safety across many different groups creates a stronger overall network than relying on a single point of failure.

Stopping digital and real-world threats

Accepting this widespread use of technology means recognizing that simple written rules will not stop complex computer and biological attacks. While developers must attempt to build safe software from the start, controlled lab tests have strict limits when faced with real-world hackers.

Altman argues that society must build its own protections.  “There’s AI that is really good at exploiting computer systems,” Altman says. “Let’s use AI to defend them.”

Building automated shields
Relying on traditional laws and human monitors to stop digital attackers leaves important global networks open to severe damage. The most effective solution requires using the exact same advanced software to build automated defenses.

By deploying these intelligent tools directly into national security networks and hospital databases, society can automatically detect and block attacks. This allows defense systems to react at the speed of the software itself, neutralizing threats before human operators even realize a breach has occurred.

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