What The Antivirus And Anti-Spam Wars Reveal About Securing AI

InnovationWhat The Antivirus And Anti-Spam Wars Reveal About Securing AIByHarsh Singhal,Forbes Councils Member.for Forbes Technology CouncilCOUNCIL POSTExpertise from Forbes Councils members, operated under license. Opinions expressed are those of the author. | Membership (fee-based)Jun 12, 2026, 07:15am EDTHarsh Singhal leads AI and Data Security at Glean, applying machine learning and agentic systems to endpoint defense and data governance. gettyFor two decades, I have watched the security industry repeat the same pattern. Every five to seven years, a new class of threat arrives, the field treats it as unprecedented and the practitioners who recognize the shape from prior waves are the ones who solve it first. AI security is the latest cycle, and the pattern is more visible than ever once you know where to look.I have had this conversation now with dozens of product leaders: They are convinced that indirect prompt injection, agentic exfiltration and model supply chain compromise are categorically new. They are not. The shape is familiar to anyone who lived through the antivirus, anti-spam and web application security wars, and the lessons from those wars tell us almost exactly what to do.The Pattern That Keeps RepeatingThe first time I watched a defensive industry transition from deterministic to probabilistic detection was in the mid-2000s, as antivirus moved from signature matching to behavioral heuristics in response to polymorphic malware. I have seen the same arc twice since: anti-spam, from blocklists to ML classifiers that today block 99.9% of unwanted email at scale, and web application security, from manual code review to layered runtime protections. In every case, the pattern was identical: When the threat got fuzzy, the defense had to become probabilistic. The teams that resisted the transition are the teams I later read about in breach disclosures.AI security is now mid-arc on the same curve. What I see in the field is a familiar division: The teams th...