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Sabrina Halper Show · 2 min · Sep 2, 2026

Agents could cause a billion-dollar security incident this decade

Matan Grinberg · Co-founder & CEO, Factory

Matan Grinberg says security is lagging behind agent adoption and predicts a billion-dollar incident this decade.

In this episode

Full analysis
  1. 23:56Enterprise AI is shifting from usage targets to ROIPro pick 5 min
  2. 28:05Open models can be worth the risk of a closed monopoly6 min
  3. 40:53Recursive self-improvement does not guarantee runaway growth6 min
  4. 18:14A two-year COBOL migration took four days with a Droid5 min
  5. 49:03Choosing what not to build is the new software moat3 min
  6. 35:19The proposed policy exempts open models from federal review4 min
  7. 38:37Agents could cause a billion-dollar security incident this decade2 min
  8. 8:54String theory taught Grinberg to decide with incomplete information3 min
“at some point in this decade, there is going to be, like, a billion-dollar incident that occurs because of agents.”
Matan Grinbergat 39:28 · Sabrina Halper Show
39:28

Takeaways

  1. He predicts a billion-dollar incident caused by agents this decade.
  2. He sees companies moving faster on capability than security.
  3. Factory says agent swarms have tried to breach its systems.

About this segment

Matan Grinberg says security is lagging behind agent adoption and predicts a billion-dollar incident this decade. He says Factory has already seen agent swarms try to breach its systems.

Matan Grinberg

Matan Grinberg is cofounder of Factory.

  • Sabrina Halper, Host · Host, Sabrina Halper Show

    Has worked as an investor at HOF Capital and founded SHS Media.

From “Factory’s Matan Grinberg on Recursive Self-Improvement, Chinese Models & Lessons From String Theory”, Sep 2, 2026. Watch the full episode

Answers “What will AI look like in the next few years?” See all 169 answers

Answers “Is AI dangerous?” See all 112 answers

Answers “Will AI make cyberattacks worse?” See all 21 answers

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

  1. 38:49

    because it feels like where we are now is we have like these really amazing agentic capabilities i feel like hackers can do a lot more with a lot less now and it doesn't feel like everyday consumers definitely aren't and even like most companies are like just trying to start adapting to this new reality of uh like how to basically defend against this like i don't know if those things are moving at the same time yeah i think right now people are moving very quickly on the like new capability and not as much on the security like this is this is a very big problem I think, unfortunately, it's probably one of those things where it'll take a very large incident for everyone to wake up and be like, oh, my God, wait, we need to really, like, secure everything.

  2. 39:30

    I've noticed the enterprise is starting to spend more time on this. So people are waking up to it. That said, I think my co-founder, Eno, had a prediction, which is at some point in this decade, there is going to be, like, a billion-dollar incident that occurs because of agents. um it honestly i think it all like maybe not one incident like security but there's a lot of uh things that people are doing with agents right now like we've had swarms of agents try to like kind of uh uh breach of our systems which has hasn't happened but or hasn't succeeded but there's been a we actually have an interesting blog post about like oh really yeah we used droids against these people who are using agents which was like crazy i think we called it the droid wars but yeah like agent uh cyber security is a brave new world it's wild do you have any reason to think that ai written code

  3. 40:21

    will be more vulnerable as as as more code out there is just like written by it's hard to say On one hand, it can be more robust because it's not prone to human mistakes. On the other hand, if, you know, if it was trained with some vulnerabilities in its latent space, it can be more methodically vulnerable, which is a weird dynamic. So I think we kind of have to be used to both. I will say probably in a few years, there'll be very few humans contributing code manually.

  4. 40:49

    Like you'll need AI written code just because it's probably more predictable as to how it's going to be.