Going inside the security ‘dark ages’ with Alex Stamos.
by Nilay PatelNov 7, 2026, 3:00 PM UTCNilay Patel is editor-in-chief of The Verge, host of the Decoder podcast, and co-host of The Vergecast.Today, I’m talking with Alex Stamos, chief security officer at Cognition and longtime cybersecurity expert, about what a mess cybersecurity is right now.
This episode is part one of a special series looking at AI in real life.
I’ve always enjoyed talking to Alex because he’s so direct, and you’re going to hear him say that the multibillion-dollar cybersecurity industry as we’ve known it is essentially overdue to the unrelenting, AI-boosted waves of hacks, breaches, and attacks — and this is only the beginning of how much AI is changing security.
