Brain drain, not AI, is the bigger cybersecurity threat, experts say
A Gizmodo piece argues that while most people now offload some cognitive work to AI, cybersecurity is where over-reliance on automation carries the biggest downstream risk: many systems running critical infrastructure have gone decades without updates, and a GAO report found the Defense Department's in-house IT system predates the first Apollo moon landing, with COBOL still widely used on government IBM mainframes. Meanwhile, an Anthropic study of more than 50 mostly junior software engineers found AI-assisted coding led to a statistically significant decrease in mastery, and in a May survey of over 850 cybersecurity professionals, two-thirds said they now spend more time reviewing AI outputs and deciding whether to trust them. The article says that as headline-grabbing models such as Anthropic's Mythos and OpenAI's Astra dominate attention, CISA has shed seasoned staff amid budget cuts and layoffs, leaving a shrinking pipeline of experienced engineers to maintain opaque, aging systems.
Amid hype about AI hacking models, the piece warns that the real bottleneck for critical infrastructure may be lost human expertise and unmaintained legacy systems.