If you can’t beat them, buy them.
AI hasn’t made cybersecurity go away or be a “solved problem,” but it has given AI companies more reasons to own security capabilities.
Looking at the chart, you can see cyber capabilities across the gamut, from model testing and AI guardrails to privacy preservation, threat detection, and more. These capabilities help AI companies secure their own products and give them more things to sell. They’re different motivations, but they reinforce each other.
Buying security expertise can help earn that trust, and that’s an area that’s getting harder to win for AI companies. Buying cyber capabilities and teams can help AI companies win more enterprise customers, make the core product safer to use, and become something the company sells in its own right.
Getting more AI into more sensitive workflows means answering harder questions about security, and customers will demand those answers whether the vendor is a model lab, a data platform, or an AI application.
The question isn’t whether AI companies are becoming cybersecurity companies. It’s how much cybersecurity they’ll need to own, and how much they’ll decide to sell.
My bet is we’ll see more of these deals, but it’s not going to reduce the need for independent cybersecurity companies. The whole AI movement has been a massive tailwind for cyber, and I don’t see that stopping any time soon.
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