How AI could make it harder for governments to use hacking tools

Eva Galperin, the director of cybersecurity at the digital rights Electronic Frontier Foundation and an expert on government spyware, said that offense has the advantage today due to a combination of AI being highly capable of finding bugs, and an increase in the number of vulnerabilities introduced by “vibe-code” developing with AI tools. 

On the other hand, Galperin argued that finding more bugs doesn’t necessarily mean more bugs will be patched fast enough, or even at all, given that patching can be a complex process. Galperin said that there will still be a renewed push for backdoors at some point because authoritarian regimes always want “exceptional access.”

Katie Moussouris, who has helped companies both big and small deal with reported bugs and patch them for decades, said that, “we have some distance to go before the latest phones and laptops are completely bug free.”

“There will be some point at which finding bugs will be much harder and that may trigger these pressures to build in backdoors,” said Moussouris, the founder and CEO of Luta Security. 

“I think we have at least until after the next presidential election before the intelligence community is materially hampered enough to push for backdoors in a serious way,” said Moussouris.