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- Mark Cuban compared swarms of AI agents to cockroaches finding ways into systems.
- Cuban said agents can launch brute-force attacks at scale without inventing new hacks.
- Cuban said defenders can also "spray" their systems with AI, which makes defenses more accessible.
Mark Cuban has pest-control tips for the AI age.
Speaking at a Reuters NEXT Newsmaker event on Friday, the entrepreneur and billionaire investor compared the threat posed by swarms of AI agents to cockroaches finding their way into a freshly treated house.
"When I go talk to cybersecurity experts, I ask them all the time. I'm like, when we hear about these hacks and breakthroughs and, you know, different problems, do these AIs invent something new?" Cuban said.
"No, they didn't invent something new," Cuban added. "But they're able to do something in mass volume that it's all brute force hacks."
Cuban compared the challenge to keeping cockroaches out of a house.
"It's like the cockroach theory, where if somebody can create enough agents, it'll find a way to get in, and then it just exploits that. But the good news is you can spray your systems with just as much AI, and I think there's gonna be more effort from the good guys trying to stop the bad guys," Cuban said. "I'm not a doomer at all."
The AI industry is already creating its own team of exterminators to contain risks.
OpenAI safety roles on LinkedIn jumped by 91% over the past year, spanning work such as system testing, technical research, and governance.
The risks have also surfaced during testing. Anthropic said that three Claude models accessed organizations’ live systems without permission after a third-party testing environment was misconfigured. The company subsequently introduced real-time classifiers to detect and block attempts to escape testing environments.
Cuban said AI could make malicious activity more accessible, but the same techniques could also strengthen defenses.
"There will be scenarios where bad stuff happens, but we've always had hacks," said Cuban. "And if it's brute force on that side with the bad guys, you can also use brute force with the good guys."