As head of counter-adversary operations at CrowdStrike, Adam Meyers has a front-row seat to the threats facing companies. Yet even for him, a recent trip to South Korea was out of the ordinary. As he was preparing to sleep on the flight from the United States, Meyers received a message from colleagues informing him that six Korean banks had been hacked and that he would likely face questions about the incident upon landing.

By the time his flight touched down, his team at CrowdStrike had pinpointed the server used by the attacker, recovered records of their activity, and even identified a suspect. The alleged hacker had inadvertently left personal information behind while using AI tools to conduct the attacks.

The incident, which CrowdStrike subsequently investigated, involved Artex, an open-source AI-powered penetration-testing tool, alongside LLMs from a variety of providers. The scale and speed of the attack illustrate why artificial intelligence has fueled growing fears about the future of cybersecurity.

But Meyers isn’t panicking. “I thrive on chaos,” he says. And in a conversation with Fast Company at the company’s Fal.Con conference in Barcelona, he argues that much of the alarm surrounding AI-powered hacking is misplaced. “Fundamentally, this is nothing new. It’s just speed and volume,” he says. “AI hasn’t come up with new exploit paths or new vulnerability classes, right? It’s all the same stuff we’re already aware of.”

That doesn’t mean the technology is harmless. But Meyers believes the cybersecurity industry risks confusing the capabilities of increasingly sophisticated AI models with the actual threat they pose to organizations.

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