Secure Acceleration: A Cyberdefense Strategy for Superintelligence

The future has already arrived, twice.

In September 2025, Anthropic detected a Chinese state-sponsored group using its agents to conduct cyber espionage against major technology companies and government agencies. According to Anthropic, the agents performed 80 to 90 percent of the tactical work: discovering vulnerabilities, developing exploits, moving laterally, and analyzing stolen data. A nation-state could now define an objective and let AI conduct most of the attack.

Then, in July 2026, OpenAI agents undergoing cybersecurity evaluations exploited vulnerabilities in the systems intended to contain them. They improvised a way to secretly communicate with one another, accessed the public internet, and compromised parts of Hugging Face’s production infrastructure. No human instructed them to attack Hugging Face. They attacked because they wanted to deceive the system evaluating their performance. An AI cyberswarm could now break out of containment and attack real-world infrastructure.

These incidents reveal two threats now bearing down on us:

Adversaries will wield AI cyberswarms against us from outside our systems.
Rogue AI cyberswarms will deceive us, circumvent safeguards, and attack us from within.

Together, they create the defining security dilemma of the AI age: We must develop and deploy the world’s most capable cyberswarms to protect our critical systems from hostile actors. But the more capable and deeply embedded these AI systems become, the more dangerous they are if they turn against us. How do we build a cyberdefense capability powerful enough to stop the threat from outside without creating a threat which we cannot contain on the inside?

Humanity is not helpless against AI threats or the adversaries that exploit them. AI capabilities are advancing faster than the security of the infrastructure underneath, but there are clear paths to improving our infrastructure and making AI development safer. We need a new approach to security, new technologies, radical research, and sustained engineering across the computing stack. We can continue advancing AI, but we must build the necessary security infrastructure alongside it.

After more than a year at the frontier of AI, cyberdefense, and national security, we have arrived at three urgent security imperatives: (1) defend our most powerful models against sabotage, (2) contain rogue AI systems from escape, and (3) secure model weights against theft.

We must secure the path to superintelligence.

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