Simon Willison: 'Cybersecurity Looks Like Proof of Work Now' — AI Vulnerability Discovery Creates Economic Security Model

Simon Willison·medium signal

Simon Willison argues that models like Claude Mythos can continuously discover security vulnerabilities as long as compute is applied, creating a new economic equation: 'to harden a system you need to spend more tokens discovering exploits than attackers will spend exploiting them.' This reframes cybersecurity from a human-expertise bottleneck to a compute-budget problem, where open-source software becomes more valuable because security research costs are distributed across all users. The insight suggests AI-powered security auditing will become a standard CI/CD step.