This market report on AI native AppSec companies (including
@mindfort) points out where security is heading. Spoiler, it is heading to zero. Let me explain:
As security agents rapidly mature and the cost of intelligence continues to drop per token, the average cost of discovery of a vulnerability will also drop. This is a double edged sword.
- On one hand, it will collapse the vulnerability economy, making bounties and VDPs not worth the cost of maintaining them, instead deploying with low cost, highly effective agents. This will have an effect on the number of people working on security research.
- On the other hand, it will also deflate the illicit market for vulnerabilities and reduce the number of zero days in circulation, and make discovery of exploitable vulnerabilities orders of magnitude more expensive for bad actors (who will also be using agents of their own).
Companies will measure security in compute. Think: 100 kWs of compute, 100m tokens per day, 150 H100s powering your security program, etc. and can directly attribute better outcomes to increased compute spent on security.
Spend becomes more efficient, finding vulns becomes cheaper, discovery happens faster, and overall security posture will increase.
We are already measuring outcomes at MindFort this way. The cost of discovering a validated vulnerability used to be measured in 10s of millions of tokens. That is dropping to sub-million tokens on average using our latest agents and our upcoming model, MF-1.
My most contrarian view on the topic is that the major AI labs will not win this market. A family of specialized cybersecurity models will win for a few reasons:
- Bringing compute in house and inferencing for the lowest cost of vulnerabilities per compute unit
- Ability to continuously train on your own security data, increasing that cost efficiency even further
- Privacy and security: guaranteeing that model labs will not train on your data
Now, while the cost of vulnerabilities will go to zero and AI agents take over continuous testing, this doesn't mean we will need less people in cyber: we will need more. We will need talented security researchers and engineers more than ever to run these programs at every company on earth.
Report below:
docs.google.com/document/d/1…