Special | Fright or FUD: The 100 Company Cyber Security Letter | 38

Cyber leadersPublished 11 Sep 2026

Features

James Lyne & Ciaran Martin

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Late August was a wild stretch for frontier AI and cyber security, capped by more than 100 companies, led by OpenAI, warning of "a limited window to strengthen cyber defenses." In this special hosts-only episode, Ciaran and James take stock. Ciaran walks through how we got here, James asks who is actually going to do all this defending, and Ciaran calls a 4,000-year-old witness on who should answer for the actions of AI agents. They close on the harder question: is trust between the AI labs and the security community fraying, and can it be repaired?

Highlights:

Frontier AI and cybersecurity

The recent developments around frontier AI and its implications for cybersecurity

The letter: A call for collective action on cyber defense
James’ Dark Reading article: What the AI Warning Letter Completely Missed
Ciaran’s Weekly One-Off Substack Welcome to FUD-tier AI!
Ancient Babylon, AI, and Cyber Security
RUSI | Beyond the Hype: AI, Ransomware and Business Models

Hugging Face

The incident, the reports that followed and some of the different reactions to what happened.

What We Still Don’t Know About OpenAI’s Hugging Face Hack
OpenAi’s report: The Hugging Face incident and the road ahead
METR’s report: Brief independent investigation of agents’ behavior, reasoning and collaboration in the OpenAI / Hugging Face hacking incident
Dwarkesh Patel’s The Rise and Fall of Agent Civilizations
Yann Lecunn’s comment
Anthropic’s announcement: Improving our alignment and security efforts

Accountability for frontier AI

A case for greater accountability drawing on an ancient principle from Hammurabi’s Code.

The Code of Hammurabi: The Best Rule To Manage Risk
Daniel Miessler’s take: What The Code of Hammurabi Can Teach Us About Hardware and Software Liability
Nicholas Nassim Taleb’s op-ed: End Bonuses for Bankers
Jovan Kurbalija’s article: From Hammurabi to ChatGPT: Why ancient legal principles apply to AI as well
Anthropic’s Advanced AI Framework

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Meet Your Hosts

James Lyne

Chief Executive Officer at SANS Institute

James has spent the past 20 years of his life chasing cybercriminals around the Internet and, as a self-professed “massive geek”, has been involved in most cyber security disciplines.

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Ciaran Martin

Professor, Non-Executive Director, SANS Cyber Leaders Network at SANS

Respected as a world leader among public authorities for cybersecurity, Ciaran Martin is the UK’s National Cyber Security Centre’s (NCSC) founder and former head.

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