AI agents can hunt vulnerabilities around the clock, but businesses still face the costly work of investigating, patching and verifying what they find.

The next cybersecurity advantage may come from cutting the cost of remediation.

As AI drives down the cost of attacks, the winners may be firms that can afford to keep finding and fixing weaknesses the longest.

Cybersecurity has always been an arms race. Artificial intelligence (AI) is turning it into a war of attrition, where the winner may be whoever can afford to keep fighting the longest.

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On Thursday (Oct. 15), for example, Sarah Breeden, deputy governor of the Bank of England (BoE), said that advances in AI meant the technology now presents a “systemic risk” to the world financial system. And a day earlier, Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan said Wednesday (Oct. 14) that the bank he leads had deployed 1,000 contractors and 3,000 employees to fix software flaws discovered by Anthropic’s Mythos and other frontier AI models.

The emerging imbalance is straightforward. An attacker can deploy inexpensive AI agents to probe software, identify weaknesses and test potential exploits around the clock. A company defending that software must determine which findings are credible, investigate whether systems are exposed, prioritize remediation, deploy patches and verify that nothing breaks in the process.

Both sides can automate parts of the work. But their economics are fundamentally different.

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