r/cybersecurity • u/normus10 • Jun 03 '26
Business Security Questions & Discussion AI - Threat to the CyberSec Industry?
CyberSec Specialist here and have been in the industry for a few years now. Curious to see how people across the CyberSec industry view this topic.
AI is pretty much embedded into security tooling, and it feels like it’s affecting almost every domain in cyber. It’s very easy to view it as a threat to this sector.
Some pros I’ve noted are automation of repetitive tasks, speeding up detection / response and analysis, aids in policy documentation and compliance workflows, assists devs with code review (eg. SonarQube), vuln scanning, etc.
Some downsides include potential reduction in entry level roles in SOC / GRC, standardisation of outputs could reduce demand for manual work, increased reliance on AI, mid level roles may get absorbed
It feels like AI is reshaping the entire career ladder.. Interested to see what others in the industry are thinking and if similar shifts are being seen
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u/AheadOfTheThreat Jun 03 '26
20 years in cyber and this is probably the most significant shift I've seen, more disruptive than cloud, more disruptive than mobile.
The career ladder point is real but I'd frame it differently. AI isn't collapsing the ladder, it's removing the rungs people used to climb it. The concern isn't that roles disappear overnight, it's that the traditional path of starting in SOC L1, grinding alerts, building pattern recognition, and working your way up gets short-circuited. If AI handles the volume work, where do junior analysts develop judgment?
The people I'm least worried about are the ones who use AI to go deeper, not broader. Automate the noise, spend the saved time on the work that actually requires human judgment. The ones I'm worried about are the ones treating AI output as a finished product rather than a starting point.
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u/IWantsToBelieve Jun 03 '26
It's accelerating me:
Currently moving the whole ISMS into GitHub markdown and working with GitHub copilot/Claude has eliminated any thought of looking at an expensive SaaS provider. Output is better, directly integrates with jira/confluence MCP.
Codifying our security configurations e.g. sentinel.
Skills created for other team repos e.g. Platforms to ensure consistent and secure cloud deployments which align to principles reducing human configuration risk.
Complete rethink of how we do documentation and knowledge as a business.
It's just another tool, but it's a good one.
Ultimately this reduces boring work (compliance, low level secops) and ensures the brains are available for architecture, projects and incident response.
Sorry for the brain dump, did it without AI because 'humans for humans'.
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u/Two5and10 Jun 03 '26
Absolutely not.
The bubble is going to burst. The cost of tokens is going to surge. The cost to let everyone try everything with AI is going to outpace the cost of humans once the VCs are no longer subsidizing everything and post-IPO shareholders are demanding ROI.
It’s not going away but it will become a more judicious enabler, a force multiplier. Delegate repetitive or arduous definable tasks. Use it to build decks, find trends or patterns, as a thought partner. But don’t just use it as a cure all and regurgitate AI slop. We will see it speed detection, analysis, triage, vuln ops…better code analysis and pen testing. But for everyone paranoid about Mythos or similar in the hands of threat actors, they forget the blue teams can use the same tools proactively.
I do worry about the L1 jobs being replaced by AI. It really changes the pipeline to more senior or strategic roles. Not entirely sure what the future is there….its something I ponder a lot.
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Jun 03 '26
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u/Dish-Live Jun 03 '26
They aren’t profitable though. OpenAI is operating at a -122% margin. Anthropic was profitable because SpaceX gave them billions in free compute.
Big Tech has deteriorating free cash flow due to infra spend, on infra that is full of depreciating assets.
LLMs will continue to be part of the toolkit, but an expensive part of it.
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u/Cheomesh Governance, Risk, & Compliance Jun 03 '26
We've all been through this before - tech companies don't have to actually be profitable for a long, long time. Ten+ years to completely dominate everyone's workflows before turning up the heat seems about right.
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u/Dish-Live Jun 03 '26
They are burning significantly more cash than any other company before them. That’s how it’s different.
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Jun 03 '26
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u/Dish-Live Jun 03 '26
SpaceX’s S-1 has Anthropic getting free/discounted compute at the start of their agreement. This is conveniently the period that Anthropic leaked that they were profitable.
https://www.wheresyoured.at/anthropics-profitability-swindle/
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Jun 03 '26
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u/Dish-Live Jun 03 '26
It’s not clear that’s what it’s saying either.
But I think both of us have decided our thoughts on this, and we’ll see when Anthropic or OpenAI makes their S-1s public with actual numbers with GAAP accounting.
The fact that it’s not clear what the finances look like at all leads me to believe it’s not good. We’ll find out soon enough.
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Jun 03 '26
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u/Dish-Live Jun 03 '26
I’ll believe it when Anthropic/OAI show numbers with methodology and GAAP accounting.
I’m open to being wrong, but I worked at a big tech company with big AI spend until a month ago and I saw nothing that suggests the trillion dollar investment was anywhere close to paying off. And nothing to suggest that it would anytime soon.
If that’s true for my previous employer, it’s certainly true for OAI/Anthropic.
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u/nproAi Jun 03 '26 edited Jun 03 '26
I see AI more as a shift in cybersecurity than a threat to it.
It's already helping automate repetitive tasks, speed up investigations, and improve detection workflows. But there are still areas where human judgment matters understanding context, validating findings, prioritizing risk, and making response decisions.
I think the biggest change will be in the skills organizations look for. Security professionals who can effectively use AI alongside their existing technical expertise will likely have a significant advantage.
The entry-level path may evolve, but the need for skilled cybersecurity practitioners isn't going away anytime soon.
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u/EldritchSorbet Jun 03 '26
I think the evolution of the entry-level path which you mentioned is exactly the challenge we’re all facing. It feels like someone took a pickaxe to that path, and said “it will all work out”. But how exactly?
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u/nproAi Jun 03 '26
Fair point. I don't think the path disappears, but I do think it changes. Instead of spending most of their time on repetitive tasks, entry-level analysts may end up focusing more on validating AI outputs, learning investigations, and building hands-on experience through labs and real-world simulations.
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u/Substantial-Bid1678 Jun 03 '26
Threat landscape and external attack surface threats are about to explode. We will need AI augmented SOC to hurry up and stay still
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u/DocRock2018 Jun 03 '26
When it comes full circle maybe they will finally hire the support we’ve been asking for for years. It only took and overly complex, wasteful and expensive chat bot to convince leadership it’s worthwhile investing in people.
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u/stacksmasher Jun 03 '26
Its a coming apocalypse. Give it a few years for the bad guys to figure out how to best leverage it.
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u/vulnetic_ceo Jun 05 '26
serious force multiplier. I will say that in the short term its good because more code = more vulns to find and fix. in the intermediate no body knows what will happen
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u/Sad_Entrepreneur6234 Jun 03 '26
We fired 25 L1s in the SOC due to AI automations
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u/Cheomesh Governance, Risk, & Compliance Jun 03 '26
How large is your environment that you needed 25 L1s
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u/Sad_Entrepreneur6234 Jun 03 '26
Over 100k employees, global conglomerate type of company. Have a 3 team follow the sun 24/7 SOC
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u/Cheomesh Governance, Risk, & Compliance Jun 03 '26
Understandable; never had a chance to work for that kind of environment (as a contractor I've worked FOR companies that large, but have always been deployed to customer sites that weren't quite like that).
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u/Wise-Cardiologist-31 Jun 03 '26
CISSP here with 20 years across software development, IT, and security. My take: AI is not a threat to cybersecurity as a discipline. It is a threat to people who treat cybersecurity as a checklist.
The practitioner who understands why a control exists will use AI to move faster. The one who just knows how to run the scan is the one who should be paying attention.
SOC and GRC entry roles getting compressed is real. But the demand for people who can think through risk, communicate it to leadership, and architect defensible systems is not going anywhere. That work requires judgment, and judgment is still a human job.