Glenn Gutwillig examines how artificial intelligence is reshaping the cybersecurity threat landscape and the investment opportunity surrounding it. The report maps AI-accelerated risks and defenses across identity, endpoints, networks, applications, data infrastructure, cloud systems, and security operations; reviews the evolving OWASP taxonomy; and evaluates how platform leaders and AI-native entrants are positioning for growing enterprise security demand.
From the original report
Selected passages from the original publication. Historical observations reflect the report's publication date, not current market advice.
Recently, while hosting an internal Gideon training session on AI Technology and Prompt Engineering, one of our summer interns asked, “What about AI is keeping you up at night?” Some of you might envision a Hollywood-style dystopian future where AI-enabled applications or humanoid robots decide that they want to take over. For others, it is concern about job loss or reduced wage growth. From my perspective, however, the more immediate threat is AI’s potential to penetrate our best cybersecurity defenses and compromise the underlying operating systems and IT applications that we depend on to run almost every aspect of our society.
I recently read that Mastercard CEO, Michael Miebach stated “By 2030, the amount of fraud and cyber risk driven damage is going to amount to $15.6 trillion. If cyber risk were a country, that would be the third largest economy in the world.” “What we essentially need to do is move from defense to offense. And that’s where our last investments have been in threat intelligence.”
Michael Miebach’s statement prompted a deeper dive into the trillion-dollar financial impact of cybercrime. Industry estimates reviewed vary by an order of magnitude depending on the methodology used to calculate them. What's counted (direct losses only vs. downstream productivity, IP theft, and remediation) appeared to matter more than which year is being measured. To ground the discussion, the figures below are presented with their source methodology intact rather than collapsed into a single consensus number.
If cybercrime were measured as a national economy at the $10.5 trillion figure, it would rank as the third largest in the world, behind only the United States and China, up from $3 trillion in 2015. Cybersecurity Ventures now projects roughly $12.2 trillion in cybercrime annually by 2031 (a somewhat lower number than the $15.6 trillion stated by Mastercard’s CEO), implying growth is decelerating to about 2.5% a year from 2026 onward, down from the 15% compound annual growth rate used to project the 2015 to 2025 climb.
For educational purposes only; not individualized investment, tax, or legal advice. Investing involves risk, including loss of principal.
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