Why You Must Brief Your Board About Looming Global Digital Conflict

InnovationWhy You Must Brief Your Board About Looming Global Digital ConflictByTJ Marlin,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)May 27, 2026, 08:15am EDTT.J. Marlin is the Founder & CEO of Guardrail Technologies, former Global Forensic Technology Leader and expert voice in AI security. gettyOn November 13, 2025, Anthropic disclosed that a state-sponsored group had used an AI coding agent to autonomously run full attack chains across roughly 30 global targets spanning technology firms, financial institutions and government agencies. The AI handled 80% to 90% of the tactical work without human direction. Five months later, the same company released Claude Mythos, a model that found thousands of previously unknown vulnerabilities across major operating systems and browsers, including a now-patched 27-year-old flaw buried in OpenBSD. Mythos' exploit success rate against Firefox's JavaScript engine was 72.4%. A prior model produced two working exploits in the same test. Mythos produced 181.​Most boards haven't been fully briefed on any of this.​For 30 years, the cybersecurity profession operated on a workable assumption: The people trying to break into your network were constrained by the creativity and imagination of the bad actor, as well as the number of human bad actors. There were only so many elite hackers, and they had to choose targets and align with state directives. They had to write their own code. This constraint is now gone. According to the American Security Project's October 2025 "Cloud of War" report, AI-assisted cyber infiltrations have increased 220% year over year since 2022, with cloud intrusions surging 136% from 2024 to 2025. The window between vulnerability discovery and weaponization has consistently decreased, per Mandiant's M-Trends reporting. Against A...