AI vs AI has begun

“We can fight back against AI,” says Sumedh Thakar, the CEO of US cybersecurity firm Qualys, “with AI to defend ourselves.” While artificial intelligence gives cyber attackers new weapons, the same technology also helps “defenders” to “speed up remediation” through automation, he points out to me.

Primarily, this means the ability to install software patches at speed, which will parry attacks.

I was asking Thakar how concerned he was about the release of Claude Mythos from Anthropic. It’s created headlines around the world in the past week, with finance ministers and banking leaders discussing it as a significant threat.

Qualys is a Silicon Valley-based cybersecurity firm with more than 2,600 employees, currently valued at close to $3bn on Nasdaq. It has been in direct consultation with major AI companies and US financial institutions to assess and advise on the ongoing cybersecurity risk from the latest AI frontier models.

Manual remediation (the human response to a vulnerability exposed by a cyber-attack) is "pretty much dead", according to Thakar, because malicious actors are now leveraging AI to develop and execute attacks at a pace humans cannot match.

While businesses used to have 30- to 90-day windows to apply patches, the focus has shifted to digital infrastructure, he explains, with remediation “at the speed of light.”

The fear in the past was that a hastily administered patch on a server could create as many problems as it solved, compromising the wider IT system. But an “AI-based patch reliability score” gives higher confidence that a patch will work, says Thakar.

Companies also still need to get over the idea of “dashboard tourism”, he points out, where they feel in control because they are monitoring risks, rather than actually tackling them. They also need to assess very quickly which new threats are actually relevant to their business, Thakar argues, as vulnerabilities don’t affect everyone equally.

There is another front in this cyber war, I’ve heard from other quarters, including our Business Leader members. Ironically, even though companies want their staff to be experimenting with the latest AI offerings to find new, efficient ways of doing things, this can, in fact, be a liability too.

“AI adoption is accelerating faster than most companies' ability to govern it,“ says Tom Wynne, co-founder of Capsule, a specialist cyber insurance broker. “The risk isn't just external threat actors — it's internal. We're seeing a sharp rise in employees using personal AI accounts rather than enterprise-grade, segregated platforms, and that's where data exposure really begins.

“The concentration of the market around a handful of AI providers compounds this: when a vulnerability like Claude Mythos surfaces, the blast radius across businesses is enormous.”

Qualys CEO Sumedh Thakar was in London because his company is holding its Risk Operations Conference (ROCon). He became CEO in 2021 but has been at Qualys for 23 years, with a background on the front line of software engineering.

He also shared some fascinating personal advice on how he developed into the CEO role, but I will save that for a future newsletter!

I was in the studio when Sir Richard Harpin recorded this week’s Business Leader podcast interview and it produced one of those moments when you could hear a pin drop.

Richard’s guest was Matt Pohlson, who is the co-founder and CEO of sweepstake specialists Omaze, a rare example of a business idea born in the US that only really found success when it moved to the UK. If you’ve seen social media posts advertising a lottery for a dream home fronted by a celebrity, then you’ve probably come across his business.

“Storytelling is an undervalued skill in business,” Pohlson told Harpin. In fact, it was a traumatic life event that shaped his attitude to storytelling in business, he explained. He was born with an abnormality in his stomach tissue, which had to be corrected with surgery.

Forty years later, some of the scar tissue dislodged in his stomach. This led to medical complications and Pohlson flatlined for several minutes as doctors figured out how to react. His family watched as the defibrillator was used on him.

Pohlson recovered from this near-death experience and it gave him a new mindset. He realised he had to “stop being fear-driven" and that “fear is just a story you tell yourself”. So he had to start telling himself a more positive story.

“The opposite of love is not hate, it's fear,” Matt told Richard, “fear can be a motivating force, [for too long] I allowed it to drive my decision making. You can make a decision out of love or fear, but when you are scared, your mind constricts, you are actually dumber.”

He had to teach himself to internalise a more positive story, changing the way he spoke to himself, to become a CEO with a success mindset.

You can also listen to the interview here.

Question of the day

As of October 2025, what percentage of UK businesses reported they are now using at least one type of Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology?

A. 26 per cent

B. 38 per cent

C. 44 per cent

D. 52 per cent

You'll find the answer at the bottom of this page

What happened this week?

1. The UK inflation rate rose to 3.3 per cent in the year to March, after the US-Israel war with Iran caused the largest jump in petrol and diesel prices in over three years. The figures from the ONS came in the same week that unemployment unexpectedly fell sharply over the three months to February, underscoring that the UK economy was in good shape before the outbreak of the war in the Middle East.
2. This week, after years of speculation, Apple CEO Tim Cook confirmed his successor. 25-year Apple veteran and vice president of hardware engineering John Ternus will take the reins from 1 September. These are big shoes to fill as Cook added $3.7tn in value to the company during his 15-year tenure. He also oversaw revenue growth of 303 per cent to $416bn, while its profit rose by 354 per cent to $112bn.
3. Primark is to be spun off and separately listed on the London stock market as its parent, Associated British Foods, seeks to sharpen its investment case after another period of declining sales and profit. The owner of Twinings tea and Kingsmill bread said it would demerge the discount fashion chain from its food operations by 2027, creating two independently listed businesses, Primark and “FoodCo”.
4. Lufthansa has said 20,000 short-haul flights are being cut from its schedule this summer. It blamed the cost of jet fuel, which it said had more than doubled, as well as labour disputes with its workforce. Most airlines are dealing with soaring costs as Middle East oil supplies remain largely cut off due to the blocking of the Strait of Hormuz. Consumers are also feeling the pinch with ticket prices starting to show significant rises.
5. Elon Musk’s SpaceX has struck a deal for the right to acquire code-editing start-up Cursor for $60bn in an attempt to catch up with AI rivals months before the rocket maker’s initial public offering. SpaceX said the companies were working together “to create the world’s best coding and knowledge work AI” and that it had an option to buy Anysphere, Cursor’s parent company, for $60bn this year. If SpaceX decides not to proceed, it would pay $10bn “for our work together”, which would in effect be among the largest termination fees in history.

Weekend reading

⇄ The HBR guide to CEO transitions

As Apple embarks on a planned CEO transition, from Tim Cook to senior vice president of hardware engineering John Ternus, Harvard Business Review has created a guide looking into what research and experience tell us about how CEOs, boards and senior leaders can prepare for similar high-stakes transitions and set themselves and their organisations up for success.

🎰 Europe’s AI endgame? Bet on reliability

In a piece for the Financial Times, Canada-based professor of computer science Yoshua Bengio says that despite being behind the US and China when it comes to AI, Europe has the unique opportunity to blaze its own trail. One built on a foundation of safety and security.

And finally

I walked past this poster in the street recently and a trend I’ve heard a lot about hit home to me. Gen Z are less into alcoholic and drug-induced hedonism (old British rites of passage) and more into fitness and health these days.

So DJs now play in gyms rather than clubs. The music has migrated. Or sometimes gym workouts happen in renovated clubs! Partly this may be a financial consideration, as the cost of living has shot up along with things like alcohol, cigarettes and club admission.

But it’s also a sign of a new maturity around looking after your body: punishing it in the right way, with workouts...

When we spoke with Will Orr, the CEO of The Gym Group, last year, this is exactly the point he made. He’d picked up on this trend from his own kids and has pivoted his clubs to make them more social experiences.

Maybe you are even reading this in a gym, while on a treadmill?

The answer to our question is A. 26 per cent.