Artificial intelligence has changed cybersecurity permanently. While OpenAI’s inadvertent attack on Hugging Face brought AI-generated attacks to everyone’s attention, AI has been on security professionals’ radar for a long time. AI makes attacks possible at a scale that was hard to imagine a few years ago. Newly discovered zero-days can be exploited almost immediately . Deepfakes and their implications for phishing, vishing, and other attacks were nightmares that we knew were real; we just hoped we’d have a few more years before we needed to defend against them. And of course, inattention to security at OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and other labs that we don’t yet know about has resulted in AI agents that attack other systems in an attempt to solve a problem.

While the headlines have been shouting about AI killing humanity, doomsday AI is more likely a smokescreen to divert attention away from real harms that are happening now. We don’t need panic. We need an assessment of where we are: What are the threats?…