European companies also worry about ‘sovereign AI’ amid US and China dominance
Cybersecurity has risen to the top of the concern list for chief executives on both sides of the Atlantic, according to Wall Street Journal columnist Alan Murray, who found two issues — both linked to geopolitics — top of mind among the business leaders he met during a week in Europe.
The first was cyber. “What everybody is concerned about is cyber, that is for sure. This has become number one,” Capgemini CEO Aiman Ezzat told Murray from his office overlooking the Arc de Triomphe in Paris.
Murray attributed the worries to geopolitics. Frontier AI models have exposed new software vulnerabilities, he reported, and increased tension with the quartet of national actors driving most cyber activity — Russia, Iran, North Korea and China — has put business on edge.
In London, the chief executives he met connected the cyber concerns to a U.K. government call for increasing personal stores of necessities, like beans and water.
The second issue, Murray wrote, is a series of concerns associated with the notion of “sovereign AI.” European companies find themselves in the middle of a technology in which the United States and China dominate — and both countries have indicated a willingness to use their technology for geopolitical ends.
For Ezzat, the stakes are operational. “The question for companies is simple,” he said. “How to ensure the continuity of my operation. How to ensure my operation is resilient. Can somebody cut my access to the technology I use, and what happens then?”
He continued: “It has become a trust issue. ‘I’m using your technology. What ensures me that your technology will still be available to me in six months or nine months? And what happens when the technology is no longer available to me?’”
The theme carried into WSJ Tech: California this week as well. Lila MacLellan, CEO Brief editor, wrote that cybersecurity was “also a recurring theme” at the conference, where several speakers “painted a grim picture of the chaos cyberattacks could cause within the next few years.”
George Arison, chief executive of Grindr, said cyberattacks are “probably the thing I’m most scared about right now.” “We had an audit committee meeting this morning…and usually security is like a 10-minute conversation. I think today took 45 minutes,” he said. “I think it’s a massive risk and a massive threat for most companies and I don’t think most executives are at all ready for what is about to come.”
Greg Brockman, co-founder and president of OpenAI, argued that software has to be built differently. “I do think that we need to build in a different way, in a more secure way, in a safe way. But I think we can move from a world where breaches are just a thing that happens to one where that’s just unthinkable. That you have real security guarantees, formally verified code, and code that was written in the first place to be secure by models that are just far better than people are at producing that kind of guarantee,” Brockman said.
The U.S. government is also organizing around the threat, according to Emil Michael, the U.S. under secretary of defense for research and engineering. “What we’re doing at the department is not only patching our own systems, of course, but we’re working at the ‘Super Intelligence Force’ to patch critical infrastructure, to have the model companies help create patching tools for these companies, and to make sure that we have a better coordinated ability to tell the country that, here’s a vulnerability, like PHP, that exists, here’s what you do about it and when. So we’re trying to coordinate that. It’s never been done before, so we’re inventing that as we go,” Michael said.
CEO Brief is written and edited by a team from the WSJ Leadership Institute: Alan Murray, its president; Erle Norton, C-Suite Content managing editor; and Lila MacLellan, CEO Brief editor. The newsletter also pointed readers to the WSJ CEO Council Summit, scheduled for San Francisco on December 7–8.