Palo Alto Networks’ Nikesh Arora is building a defense against the dark side of AI

Cybersecurity’s AI reckoning has arrived, and Arora has become a go-to advisor to CEOs.

In April, Nikesh Arora applied a simple but unsettling test to his $300 billion cybersecurity company, Palo Alto Networks: He turned loose on the company’s internal infrastructure an unreleased version of a terrifyingly powerful new AI model called Mythos, created by the artificial intelligence company Anthropic. Arora’s team prompted it to find vulnerabilities in the company’s systems.

Claude Mythos 5, Anthropic’s frontier AI model for advanced coding and cybersecurity work, was so effective at hacking into systems that the U.S. government has sought to limit its release. It even temporarily imposed export controls on Mythos and a related model called Fable in June, a move that forced Anthropic to disable the model for all users. The government subsequently allowed the company to restore access to Mythos for a small number of vetted U.S. users, and later allowed Anthropic to make it available to select users in 15 other countries.

At Palo Alto Networks, the results of the controlled test were troubling. Mythos surfaced weaknesses in Palo Alto’s systems at a speed and scale that Arora immediately knew would change cybersecurity permanently. He also realized that Mythos—and competing models from Anthropic rival OpenAI—had created “the best marketing moment for the cybersecurity industry in history.”

The model’s capabilities made tangible a nightmare scenario where attackers could, almost instantly, find the sorts of vulnerabilities that could be used to cripple the infrastructure that runs our lives, from banks and corporations to hospitals, airports, and governments. That realization—along with several recent incidents involving AI agents “going rogue” and rising concerns about an AI-driven doomsday scenario for humankind—has led several leading AI vendors, including Anthropic, to call for a coordinated slowdown among the companies building AI systems, to allow the safety measures to catch up.

In short: For cybersecurity, AI is likely to be an unprecedented driver of growth as well as an existential challenge. The exigencies of the moment are placing Arora, Palo Alto Networks’ straight-talking chief executive, at the center of a widening reckoning in tech—and are making him a sought-after counselor to the leaders of AI companies and other CEOs.

Prior to Mythos, Arora says, when he called a company to discuss cybersecurity, the answer might as well have been, “Sure, stand right by the insurance guy.” Now, he says, “for the first time, CEOs want to see Mythos, they want to talk about it.”

At the same time, Mythos and its ilk have created some powerful new competitors for Palo Alto Networks, as leading AI companies are looking to directly sell their own models as cyber defense solutions. Lee Klarich, chief product and technology officer at Palo Alto Networks, doesn’t see this as a major threat. “I don’t believe companies will trust the big AI labs to provide their cybersecurity,” Klarich says. “So, in that context, I think Nikesh’s voice rises above all others.”

Interestingly, one of the leaders who has turned often to Arora for advice in recent years is Sam Altman. The OpenAI CEO is the first to admit that the powerful capabilities of the models his company is building have changed the risk equation for companies everywhere.

“Just a crazy amount of work has to happen to avoid major cybersecurity problems,” Altman tells Fortune. “I think it’s going to be hard to patch every bug on the internet. We need a new model of cybersecurity here.”

That’s exactly what Arora is trying to build at Palo Alto Networks, which was cofounded by the Israeli cybersecurity entrepreneur Nir Zuk in 2005. A firewall provider originally, the company has always sold products that prevent and remediate cyberattacks. Under Arora’s leadership, the company has grown and focused intensely on security in the AI era.

“Just a crazy amount of work has to happen to avoid major cybersecurity problems. We need a new model of cybersecurity here.”OpenAI CEO Sam Altman

“Just a crazy amount of work has to happen to avoid major cybersecurity problems. We need a new model of cybersecurity here.”

These days, Palo Alto Networks is a sprawling platform spanning areas including network, cloud, identity, endpoint, and observability. The company’s customers include some 95% of the Fortune 500. Tyson Foods and Colgate-Palmolive use the service, as do the National Hockey League and Major League Baseball. Palo Alto Networks even secures the Sphere in Las Vegas, one of the most targeted digital spaces in the world.

No one wholly agrees on what the total addressable market for cybersecurity is, though all estimates of its worth are in the hundreds of billions. Jonathan Ho, partner and tech equity research analyst at William Blair, believes AI is an unmitigated tailwind and “cumulatively, probably doubles the size of the market.” Palo Alto says it currently controls 6% of that market, and Arora is confident it can grow its........

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