Cloudflare and Vercel warn of AI cyber panic

A few weeks ago, I heard a strange story about a friend who works at one of the big tech companies in Silicon Valley.

She had recently ripped out smart devices from her house, ordered paper bank statements, and stocked up on canned goods in her basement.

Today he is a very sensible, experienced and quite senior person within one of the largest Internet companies in the world. Why was she disconnecting so much? To be safe, my family also ordered paper bank statements. But it was still a headache.

Fast forward to this week, and his actions seem a little less crazy.

AI models have revealed serious security flaws in software used by around 70% of websites. Meanwhile, U.S. banks are discovering AI agents in customer accounts, some of which appear to be acting without instructions from their owners, Axios reported.

“Black October”

The digerati have now entered full panic mode. Much of the Internet’s collapse is happening on the Internet, my colleague Alice Tecotzky noted.

On X and Reddit, warnings of an impending “Black October” morphed into visions of AI bringing civilization to an end. A lengthy article on

Oh, and don’t forget the manual can opener. You don’t want to survive the AI ​​apocalypse only to be defeated by a can of beans.

Nikita Bier, a prominent app developer and former product manager at X, captured the mood best.

“It’s time to turn off the Internet,” he said Wednesday evening.

Cloudflare executive says it’s ‘a little scary’

If you’re reading this, you haven’t done it yet. But should we really be worried?

I posed this question to Stephanie Cohen, chief strategy officer at Cloudflare, which helps protect about 20 percent of the Internet.

“The world is a little scary right now,” she told me on the sidelines of Cloudflare’s annual conference in San Francisco this week.

Here’s the problem. The Internet is built on decades of software, much of which is riddled with security flaws.

Some of these weaknesses have been known for years. However, repairing them takes time and money, and hackers often didn’t have the skills to exploit them anyway. So they remained alone.

AI Changes this calculation in a dramatic way. Someone who previously needed several years of training to get into a computer system can now benefit from the help of an AI model. And these tools can find weaknesses at a speed that humans simply can’t match.

Result: the number of recently published software vulnerabilities (Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures in industry jargon) has exploded.

Today, there is a frantic race between those who try to break into the systems and those who try to protect them.

Don’t panic about AI

Cohen’s message, however, was surprisingly reassuring.

AI helps the good guys find and fix these problems. Cloudflare, for example, has released protections against the latest vulnerability for customers, including those using its free service.

And a bigger effort is underway.

OpenAI launched an initiative called Patch the Planet, working with Cloudflare and other security professionals to use AI to detect weaknesses in widely used software and help fix them.

Tom Occhino, chief product officer at Vercel, told me recently that his company is talking with partners about launching a nonprofit that would fund a swarm of good AI agents who go online to find and fix flaws in software.

Amazon is also joining the fight. Its new Continuum service, available Thursday, uses AI agents to find security vulnerabilities and suggest fixes. Amazon said people with freely available software can use it to protect the broader Internet.

Humans may still need to review and approve these repairs, but the prospect of AI helping clean up decades of neglected software is encouraging.

The irony of this situation is not lost on some in the industry.

“The funny thing is that everyone said AI code errors would cause a cyber crisis, but in reality it’s all old human error that’s causing it and AI is just cleaning it up,” software engineer Ben Kaufman wrote on X Thursday.

Either way, Cloudflare’s Cohen believes these AI-inspired panics will push the industry to do better — by exposing the problems and adding urgency to fix them.

“We might end up in a world where, in the end, we will have become much safer,” she said.

The problem is getting there.

A fundamental question about the Internet

When I recently met with Occhino at a Vercel conference in San Francisco, he described a world in which software everyone thought was safe suddenly appears as malware. vulnerable because increasingly powerful AI models peer into the core systems that underpin the Internet.

This led to a more fundamental discussion between us: why did we connect so many things to the Internet in the first place?

For years, the tech industry has been racing to put everything online. Thermostats. Refrigerators. Doorbells. Cars. Bank accounts.

We assumed that connecting something to the Internet automatically improved it.

Maybe we should reconsider our decision.

Before the Internet

I remember the world before the Internet. It worked pretty well. We’ve managed to run our errands, pay our bills, heat our homes, and generally get through the day without every device communicating with a computer somewhere.

This does not mean abandoning online banking or throwing your smartphone into the sea.

Occhino, for his part, isn’t particularly worried about hackers wiping out his bank account. Modern banks have sophisticated protections and he recommends everyone enable additional login security.

Perhaps cybersecurity specialists, who spend their lives immersed in online threats, are missing something obvious.

Not everything needs to be connected.

Occhino said it well: “There are some things that don’t make sense to be on the Internet in the first place.”

Perhaps that’s the lesson to be learned from this week’s panic. We don’t need to turn off the Internet.

We just need to remember where the off switch is.

Alice Tecotzky contributed reporting.

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