A $90 Key into Your Company's Secrets

The cost of breaking into a corporate network with AI has fallen 99% in five months, & corporate security budgets are racing to catch up.

Goldman executives have discussed how the firm could soon be on track to spend as much or more on AI for security than it spends on AI coding tools.^1,2

Security has been a collection of layers of defense, each an insurance policy against a particular kind of attack.¹ As autonomous AI threats become the predominant risk, both attackers & defenders are competing on how much AI compute they can deploy.

An attacker’s math is an expected-value calculation on compute. Spend $1m of AI tokens trying to break into a bank with a 1% chance at a $1b payout, & the expected value is $10m : a $9m expected profit. Spend that same compute on a 5% chance at a $500k payout, & the expected return is $25k : a $975k loss. Because cheap defensive filters block low-effort noise, rational attackers stop spraying small targets & concentrate their tokens on the largest balance sheets.

Defenders face a harder equation : how much defensive AI it takes to neutralize each dollar of offensive AI.

In April, Anthropic & OpenAI tested whether Claude Mythos Preview & GPT-5.5 could break into a simulated British corporate network : a 32-step hack across 20 servers that takes a human expert 20 hours.^3,4 Both models took over the network without human help, & the Bank for International Settlements priced the break-in at $5k to $10k.³

Five months later, the price of that same break-in has fallen 99%. Claude Mythos 5 dropped the cost to $770 in June, Claude Opus 5 to $385 in July, & Zhipu’s open-weight GLM-5.3 matches Mythos’s exploit rate for $90 : one-sixtieth of April’s frontier cost.⁵

In the security operations center, AI agents relieve overwhelmed human teams who face more than 4,400 alerts a day & historically lacked the hours to examine two-thirds of them : autonomous investigations compress a 70-minute manual review into minutes for about $2 of compute per alert, freeing analysts to focus on real intrusions.⁶

Yet the cost ratio still starts tilted toward the attacker, because the SOC must inspect every alert, every hour.^3,7

Three multipliers compound that defensive compute requirement :

First, speed : Glean CISO Sunil Agrawal notes that AI compresses intrusion response from months to minutes, while CrowdStrike records average breakout times of 29 minutes & a fastest of 27 seconds.^8,9

Second, scale : in the July 2026 intrusion at Hugging Face, a swarm of 700 AI agents coordinated across four & a half days, exchanging 70,000 messages & executing 17,600 actions until they harvested 136 production keys, & Cogent Research finds 76% of new monthly enterprise attack paths (up 386% year over year) are viable only for parallel AI swarms.¹⁰

Third, breadth : non-human identities already outnumber employees 82 to 1, & as enterprise agent fleets scale to 100x headcount, every new agent expands the surface area to defend.^11,12

The CISO’s job is no longer stacking per-seat insurance policies. It is maximizing the efficiency & effectiveness of the security stack : buying enough compute, & converting it into enough defensive tokens, to drive the attacker’s expected value below zero.