Money Talks: Is it Time To Panic About A.I. Yet?

Emily Peck (0:03)

You live in the FUD?

Sam Sabin (0:05)

Yes, absolutely.

Emily Peck (0:10)

Hello, and welcome to Money Talks, a special extra podcast from Slate Money where we chat with brilliant and interesting people. I'm Emily Peck. I write the market's newsletter at Axios and co-host Slate Money.

Lately on the show and in the newsletter I write at Axios, all we seem to do is talk about AI. From our perspective, it's all about investment. Investment in AI is driving the economy, it's driving the stock market. But also it's doing something else, which is to put it in a very technical way, it's scaring the hell out of people. Earlier this year, everyone woke up to this notion that AI could maybe go rogue, I don't know, kill us all.

After the hugging face incident, that's when OpenAI revealed that a group of AI agents had broken containment and hacked into the computer systems of another company hugging face. And since then, there's been a drumbeat of sort of similar news leaks where OpenAI or Anthropic says, oh, our agents did this or that. And there's been increasingly loud calls to regulate AI, like we've done in the past for other scary technologies, cars, nuclear weapons. As cars, I count as a scary technology. Anyway, I wanted to talk about this with the people on the ground kind of watching this all unfold. And for me, that had to be just two amazing reporters from Axios, where I work. And they're both going to come in and talk to me for this episode. First, I'm going to talk to Sam Sabin. She's a cybersecurity reporter at Axios who's going to join and talk about sort of the real threats when it comes to AI, what she's seeing, what's alarmist, what's real. Then after a break, we'll get to Maria Curie. And she covers tech policy and has basically been on top of the Trump administration's every move in the space. And she'll join to talk about how the White House and lawmakers at the state level in particular are handling this fast moving situation. It's pretty fun. So stick around. We'll be right back.

Welcome back to Money Talks and I'm joined now as promised by Sam Sabin. She is an incredible cybersecurity reporter at Axios. Sam, welcome to Money Talks.

Sam Sabin (2:38)

Thanks for having me, Emily. I'm so excited.

Emily Peck (2:41)

I'm so excited. So you cover cybersecurity and hacking and have done so even before AI was all that anyone was talking about. You were on top of the whole situation. And it's already kind of a scary beat. I can imagine. I've heard you talk, I think, at our latest retreat, and you just sounded so paranoid about everything AI related. We were being told to use it and you were like, but there are these issues. While everyone's sort of worried about AI and hacking, you've been reporting the AI hacking crisis is already, it's basically happening already.

What has changed, say, in the past six months? Has it made you more worried? What does the AI hacking crisis look like right now to you?

Sam Sabin (3:29)

So interesting that whenever someone says I come across as paranoid, because I'd argue that compared to the people I talk to, I'm more measured, I'm not as scared.

I think in the last six months, two things have happened that have been a little bit different in terms of AI and its impact on cybersecurity. One, the capabilities have changed. I'm sure people have seen all the headlines dating back to April, which was only six months ago, which feels like a lifetime ago for whatever reason in this world, when Anthropic started warning people about a scary new model called Mythos that would be able to find bugs and zero days and throwing around all these words that really I think lit up a lot of people across enterprises who maybe had been taking cybersecurity for granted or didn't think that the AI models were there. And then too, I think as a result of that, there's been a lot of attention paid to cybersecurity, and you have a lot of people who are new, who maybe are not in the industry, or it was maybe a secondary thing they had to worry about on their checklist that are now starting to learn about it. And so you're getting a lot of research and guidelines that are filled with fear, uncertainty, and doubt, or FUD, a fun acronym that we like to use in the industry. Sometimes we have fun here.

That I think is really, really, really turning up the temperature around the concerns around cybersecurity threats. And so things are scary. Models are definitely capable. We're seeing more and more cyber criminals using AI in their attacks. But at the same time, you're also getting a very, like, alarmist, the sky is going to fall down, the internet is going to come crumbling apart, and you can't access your money or whatever as well. That's really making it hard to figure out what's real, what's not. And it's really difficult to parse through. And I live in this space day in and day out.