Fareed Zakaria engagement report

Best tweets

• Oct 7, 202628x their median

  "Will AI cause Armageddon?" is the wrong question. The discussion about the threats that AI might pose has taken on an apocalyptic tone: will it extinguish life on Earth? Will it destroy humanity? It won’t, but it poses some far more real dangers to us all—right now, not in some imagined future. In the next couple of years, we are likely to face a new wave of rampant, pervasive cyberattacks and cybercrime. As the recent series of attacks by AI agents show, we no longer need to speculate about whether AI can conduct cyberattacks. It can. The important question now is what happens when attacks that once required skilled human beings can be conducted by machines, at machine speed and machine scale. For most of cybersecurity’s history, we have built defenses around an unstated assumption: the attacker is human. A person—or a team—has to inspect a system, find a weakness, exploit it, see what happens and decide what to do next. That takes time. Detection therefore buys time. Defenders spot an intrusion and respond before the attacker gets much further. Frontier AI attacks that assumption. An agent does not need to sleep. It can inspect code, probe a network, hit a barrier, devise another approach and try again. Make a thousand copies and they can work against a thousand targets at once. Allow agents to share what they learn and hacking begins to change from a human-scale activity into a machine-scale one. At Rubrik, we are seeing part of this transformation firsthand. Through our participation in Anthropic’s Project Glasswing, one lesson became clear. AI is not necessarily creating new vulnerabilities. It is collapsing the cost and time required to discover them. That changes the economics of cybersecurity. Modern software may contain thousands of small imperfections. Most lead nowhere. A few, combined in the right sequence, open a path through a supposedly secure system. Historically, finding those chains required talented people, lots of time and some luck. Frontier models can increasingly do the searching themselves, discovering paths through complex systems that humans might never find. This is what makes complacency about the new threat so dangerous. In 1998 a group of hackers appeared before Congress and warned that the rapidly expanding internet contained vulnerabilities capable of producing enormous disruption. There was no single cyber Armageddon. Instead North Korea crippled Sony Pictures. WannaCry raced through more than 200,000 computers in roughly 150 countries, disrupting hospitals and factories. NotPetya began as a Russian attack on Ukraine and caused about $10 billion in damage worldwide. Ransomware shut down Colonial Pipeline and disrupted fuel supplies across the American east coast. It would be strange to look at that history and conclude that the warnings were overblown. The catastrophe did not arrive as one spectacular event. Cyber insecurity became a permanent condition. Now imagine that condition at machine speed. That is why “Will AI cause Armageddon?” is the wrong question. A hospital whose systems are encrypted, a bank that loses control of its identities, or a company that cannot recover its data doesn’t care much whether civilization remains intact. The question is whether AI can make attacks faster, cheaper, more sophisticated and vastly easier to replicate. We are beginning to get the answer. Cyber-defense therefore has to change as well. For years the industry has concentrated on prevention and detection: keep the attacker out and, failing that, spot him quickly. Both remain essential. But when attacks operate at machine speed, detection may no longer buy enough time. Intrusion, exploitation and damage can begin to collapse toward the same instant. Companies must assume that some attacks will succeed. They need to be able to recover just as fast. The answer is not less AI. It is more AI on the defensive side: continuously hunting vulnerabilities, watching identities and data, detecting abnormal behavior, patching weaknesses and helping restore compromised systems. Machine-speed attacks require machine-speed defense. There has always been an asymmetry in cybersecurity. An attacker has to be right once. A defender has to be right every time. AI makes that imbalance more dangerous because attackers do not need permission, compliance reviews or perfect systems. They need only find one opening—and now they can search for it continuously, cheaply and at an enormous scale. Criminal groups and hostile governments will use this technology. They would be foolish not to. The first generation of cybersecurity was built to stop human beings sitting at keyboards. That world has ended. The next attack may be launched by thousands of agents, moving at a speed no human team can match. If the hackers are becoming machines, our defenses must become machines too.

  8.1K31597325.3M viewsView on X
• Aug 16, 202628x their median

  For decades, Sweden was known for its inclusive welfare state and its strong voice on human rights. But recently, the country has come to resemble something very different: an ultra-capitalist haven, with an increasingly tough approach on immigration. I explained what changed: https://t.co/Z3epDw8IBl

  6.4K1.2K5402371.3M viewsView on X
• Aug 9, 202613x their median

  Democrats are facing a dilemma: The left has the passion, but the middle still has the votes the party needs to win in general elections. To win, Democrats don’t need to move left on economics. They need to move to the center on cultural issues. My take: https://t.co/5kyDsei6UH

  2.8K458631187414K viewsView on X
• Sep 13, 202610x their median

  Diplomacy begins with understanding the person across the table. In negotiating with Vladimir Putin, Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff see a businessman. Putin’s record suggests that he is something very different. My take: https://t.co/cMqmvmm9OP

  2.3K67412350133K viewsView on X
• Aug 2, 20267.8x their median

  President Trump's tariffs have made the US into a paragon of protectionism. The result has been higher prices, weaker investment, fewer manufacturing jobs — and a willingness to make falsehood official policy in order to defend a failed economic creed. My take: https://t.co/SXLshuZQbh

  1.7K605983094K viewsView on X
• Jul 31, 20267.8x their median

  The result of President Trump’s tariffs has not been a manufacturing renaissance. It has been higher prices, weaker investment, fewer manufacturing jobs — and a willingness to make falsehood official policy in order to defend a failed economic creed. My latest column: https://t.co/8MoZgoguBD

  1.6K696693268K viewsView on X
• Oct 18, 20267.7x their median

  Saudi Arabia has the biggest economy in the Middle East, and one of the world's most expensive military arsenals. So why is it so vulnerable to attacks from the Houthis, the Yemeni rebel group? I asked Bernard Haykel, professor of Near Eastern studies at Princeton: https://t.co/To1XbE3dns

  1.8K36812629227K viewsView on X
• Oct 18, 20266.9x their median

  California's failure to build high-speed rail is maybe the most egregious example of America's inability to deliver modern infrastructure. Perhaps it could learn from another Western country with one of the world's largest and cheapest high-speed train networks: Spain. I explained:

  1.6K31712856113K viewsView on X
• Aug 14, 20266.9x their median

  For eight decades, the U.S. built up something as powerful as aircraft carriers and squadrons of F-35s: credibility. The Iran war has been a master class in how to squander it. My latest column: https://t.co/HFo9O71vv8

  1.5K45910635235K viewsView on X
• Jul 26, 20266.3x their median

  Iran's economy has been pummeled by war and sanctions. So why has that country not been compelled to make peace? The answer lies in part in Tehran's surprising degree of economic resilience: https://t.co/FLRTy7UhQ3

  1.5K30310817164K viewsView on X

Ranked by total interactions across everything we have tracked for this account, which is a longer history than the 30-day window the rates above use. The multiple compares each post to this account's own median.

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