Companies & AI

Dear CEOs, Please Let Yourselves Be Hacked!

There is a story unfolding that matters to any CEO running an organisation that has a profound impact on society: banks, energy companies, government agencies, healthcare institutions, telcos. And I am sure I am forgetting some.

That story is the enhanced capability of AI to find security leaks. Fast, and in places where existing security procedures are unable to find them. Most companies tend to be very hush hush when a data breach or a hack has happened. Understandable for various reasons. Yet in this age of AI, I believe, exactly the wrong strategy.

Trust through transparency decides everything

Trust is key. Transparency in the age of AI is the biggest lever to gain that trust. Not only do I hope you and your CIO are already using Kimi K3 and finding your own IT vulnerabilities. More so, I hope you communicate about it proactively. If you have found issues and are solving them, or have solved them. If you have not found issues. Both are a huge testament to you understanding what your company is dealing with, and how much you respect your customers and the impact that a potential issue can have on their lives and on society as a whole.

Use available open source tools

The tools you use matter, especially since developments are going so fast. Kimi K3 is fully open source and directly available to anyone. Equally accessible to white hat and black hat hackers. OpenAI and Anthropic have comparable capabilities, though closed source, yet they have decided to gate the access to this specific part of their models. The exact access that is needed to counteract bad actors. That means you can not simply pick up OpenAI or Anthropic and start fighting back, you have to apply for vetted access first. With Kimi K3 you can start today (as of now, as far as I know, disclaimer if they do decide to open up access, hopefully they do).

It matters more since this weekend

This weekend a hack started in the bitcoin ecosystem. A supplier of so-called hardware wallets was found to have a severe bug, leading to the possibility of brute forcing the security codes of customers who used their product to generate that code. That meant that many hard working individuals, not big companies, got their savings stolen. The bitcoin network did not get hacked. In fact, in the last 15 years the network has never been hacked. It was a specific supplier’s product that had bad code.

Learn from others who went before you

Since the bitcoin network is global, fully open source and contains a lot of money, it is the first honey pot with many incentives for hackers to go after. That makes it one of the first places AI will be tested. It is also the community where the smartest people in tech are building together from a deeply shared purpose. Meaning they are super fast to respond to events like this, run Kimi K3 on all of their own software, and come out stronger for it. This is a super agile community.

Agility is not a strength for most companies

How often have you and your colleagues talked about wanting to be more agile? How often are all the legacy systems you have to deal with a big headache, preventing you from being as agile as you want? How challenging is it to attract the most innovative and tech savvy developers to work for you? It is a super challenging context you have to manage. Despite that, I really hope that you will find a way to let yourself be hacked, use Kimi K3 and all available tools, and most importantly: be transparent about your actions and findings to your customers and your employees.

AI is an amazing invention for humanity. Let us use it to strengthen our ecosystem.