OpenAI president Greg Brockman on Sunday warned enterprise CISOs that they need to more aggressively embrace agents if they want to survive upcoming cyberattacks.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Brockman said in a blog post that it has become \u201cincreasingly clear\u201d that company systems are hiding \u201csignificant flaws, and defenders need to find and fix them before attackers do.\u201d<\/p>\n
He added: \u201cThe Hugging Face incident showed that we underestimated the real-world cyber capabilities of our AI models.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
The details he shared about OpenAI\u2019s current defensive efforts, however, were mostly routine best practices familiar to enterprises.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cWe continue to invest in secure architecture and controls, embrace strategies like defense in depth and least privilege, and are designing systems that require multiple independent controls to fail simultaneously for something catastrophic to occur,\u201d Brockman said. \u201cClassic security controls like network isolation, workload hardening, monitoring, and safe patching and deployment will be more important than ever in the AI future.\u201d<\/p>\n
To combat emerging threats, Brockman also advised enterprise CISOs to increase their use of agentic systems, not surprisingly recommending those from OpenAI.<\/p>\n
\u201cGive your security team an agent,\u201d he wrote. \u201cStart using Codex, the Codex Security plugin, or another capable agentic coding and security tool. Give it approved access to the codebases, infrastructure configurations, and technical documentation your security team needs to assess. Do not wait for a company-wide rollout to start with your highest-priority systems.\u201d<\/p>\n
Then, he said, \u201cEquip that agent with security expertise. Start from community-supported skills, which include workflows for static analysis, security-focused code review, vulnerability variant analysis, software supply-chain risk, and other security workflows. Then build your own skills around your organization\u2019s architecture, security standards, threat models, and playbooks.\u201d<\/p>\n
Analysts and consultants said that Brockman\u2019s advice was accurate, but that it was also obvious and somewhat self-serving.<\/p>\n
Gartner VP analyst Nader Henein put it bluntly: \u201cAs a rule, I tend to recommend against taking advice from a party actively selling the solution to a problem they had a role in creating. Curiously, at no point in the blog post is the subject of liability discussed.\u201d<\/p>\n
Pieter Arntz, malware intelligence researcher at Malwarebytes, added \u201cthe thing that really stands out to me is that the OpenAI sales pitch is unusually explicit.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201c\u2018Give your security team an agent\u2019 and provide it access to code, infrastructure configurations, and technical documentation, and begin with high-priority systems rather than waiting for a company-wide rollout,\u201d Arntz said, paraphrasing Brockman\u2019s post. \u201cThe recommended trajectory from read-only scans to alert triage to automatic closure of narrowly defined false positives is sensible in outline, but OpenAI is clearly trying to normalize agent access for enterprise environments.\u201d<\/p>\n
Flavio Villanustre, CISO for the LexisNexis Risk Solutions Group, was also skeptical.<\/p>\n
\u201cAlthough I agree in general with Mr. Brockman\u2019s recommendations, this is a problem that OpenAI helped create in the first place. And the recommendation seems to be for users to now pay more to OpenAI as they use AI to defend themselves,\u201d he said. \u201cI\u2019m fully aware that the cat is now out of the bag and cannot be put back, but I believe that OpenAI should take a responsible approach and help address the problem with higher safety standards, and even fund initiatives that increase software security in general. Perhaps help fund key open source projects that are currently severely overtaxed with the increased volumes of AI-generated findings and fixes.\u201c<\/p>\n
\u201cAccountability should always start at home,\u201d he added, \u201cand I don\u2019t see this reflected in that blog post.\u201d<\/p>\n