Will AI make cybersecurity obsolete or is Silicon Valley confabulating again?
Will AI make cybersecurity obsolete or is Silicon Valley confabulating again?
https://www.zdnet.com/article/ai-cybersecurity-silicon-valley/
Publish Date: 2026-03-02 14:28:00
Source Domain: www.zdnet.com
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ZDNET’s key takeaways
- Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google tools can automate code debugging.
- But cybersecurity is too complex a problem for these tools to solve.
- AI’s biggest contribution may be to reduce avoidable software flaws.
Can you trust the companies that are building AI to make the technology safe for the world to use?
That is one of the most pressing questions you face this year as a user of AI, and it is not an academic question. As real-world deployments of the technology proliferate, novel kinds of risks are emerging with potentially catastrophic impact, demanding fresh solutions.
Also: 10 ways AI can inflict unprecedented damage in 2026
To the rescue come the major creators of AI models, OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google. All three offer tools that could mitigate failures and security breaches in LLMs and the agentic programs built on top of them.
(Disclosure: Ziff Davis, ZDNET’s parent company, filed an April 2025 lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.)
Wall Street observers think there is a real possibility that AI firms’ tools will displace the traditional cybersecurity offerings from companies such as Palo Alto Networks, Zscaler, and Check Point Software. A related field, called observability, is also threatened, including firms such as Dynatrace that sell tools to detect system failures.
The notion that most or all of the world’s software problems will be solved by software creators at the source, before programs enter the wild, is indeed tantalizing. No more denials of service, no more ransomware, no more supply chain attacks if you get it right from the start.
Only, it’s not that simple.
The challenge is greater than the potential achievements of any tool or approach. The risks of software, including AI models and agents, are too broad in scope for those companies to resolve on their…
