Today · post October 23

Saxe says cybercrime damage lags AI; the post shows no data

Security researcher Joshua Saxe argues that as AI attack capability rises, cybercrime damage won't rise in step, and that defenders are in an interlude now. Saxe's reasons: criminals are relatively low-skilled and constrained by sanctions and limits on model access; ransomware took years to go from first appearance to scale, and states are slow to integrate new technology (Joshua Saxe, 2026-10-23). Saxe's claim is that how fast the risk arrives depends on how fast the technology diffuses, not how fast capability grows. Princeton scholar Arvind Narayanan reposted it in agreement, saying that rising capability without a matching change in damage is the hardest part of AI safety policy (Arvind Narayanan, 2026-10-23). This is Saxe's personal judgment; the post itself has no damage time-series data attached, and Saxe's longer piece with charts hasn't been reviewed. Damage not yet rising could also just be lag in the statistics. Our reading: this framework can be checked, and what to check is the time series of damage from ransomware and intrusion cases, not models' test scores. How we checked →

Concept illustration on a peach background: a long, winding queue of figures in black eye masks stands along rope barriers and leads to a red turnstile between two barrier panels lettered SANCTIONS and MODEL ACCESS, and one masked figure who has passed the turnstile walks forward reading an open booklet. At the bottom centre is the dark silhouette of a person's head and shoulders, with a multi-storey building with one cracked window on the left, an open laptop whose screen shows a speech bubble with lines on the right, and a large black quotation mark in the top-right corner.

Source and checks

This item ran in the brief of Oct 24, 2026, alongside 11 other items. How we checked it, the quote checks and what was still missing that day are on that issue's How we checked page.

Cite this item

SecondSource (2026). "Saxe says cybercrime damage lags AI; the post shows no data." https://secondsource.io/en/expert/2026-10-24-1/. Accessed access date.