Earlier this year, Joe Lin, cofounder and CEO of AI startup Twenty, met with venture capitalists Vinod Khosla and Jon Chu in San Francisco. After an hour and a half of proselytizing about the company’s plans to automate hacking campaigns for the Pentagon, he’d convinced Khosla Ventures to put $30 million into the business. It’s now valued at $1.2 billion with $168 in total funding, less than a year after Forbes first reported it was coming out of stealth with backing from the CIA’s investment arm In-Q-Tel.

Twenty’s software uses AI to run hacking campaigns simultaneously, automating the gruntwork of cyberwarfare. That includes identifying targets and carrying out reconnaissance, or deciding what to do once that target has been compromised. Before next-generation AI was available, a cyber campaign against a single target could take months or years, Lin says. Now it’s much faster.

“We’re trying to industrialize cyber warfare,” Lin says. “We're going from current processes that are highly artisanal to ones that can scale out industrially, where you're able to simultaneously prosecute........

© Forbes