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Weapon or Wilderness? AI’s Role in Security
- Lytical Ventures
- Jul 9
- 4 min read
Cyber Thoughts Newsletter
JULY 2025
Ah yes, July 4th. That special time of year when we celebrate American independence by blowing stuff up. While we’re on the subject of warfare and America, let’s preview our upcoming presentation to the U.S. Council on Foreign Relations.
(See how casually we dropped that humblebrag? Barely noticeable).
AI’s Dual Nature in Cybersecurity
AI’s interaction with cybersecurity can be viewed through two lenses: as a technology, or as new terrain.
AI as Technology: The Airplane
Just as airplanes revolutionized warfare between WWI and WWII—bypassing trenches, striking deep into enemy territory—AI is reshaping the cyber conflict landscape. LLMs are the bombers of this new era: automating and industrializing phishing, bypassing traditional perimeters with terrifying ease. (See those em dashes “—”? That’s the sign of quality AI!)
In response, defenders are scrambling. Anti-aircraft guns became endpoint tools. Fighter jets became AI-enabled detection systems. Not literally, of course. But conceptually? It tracks. The arms race just leveled up: faster, stranger, and now with LLMs.
Cybersecurity has always been an arms race. Viewed this way, AI is simply the next escalation in an ongoing battle: machine vs. machine, and no humans in the loop.
Movie franchise analogy: The Terminator.
AI as New Terrain: The New World
Trigger warning: this next one is an imperfect analogy. We’re not trying to minimize colonization or the destruction of native peoples. But also… it kind of works. (Though we’ll resist drawing a line from land theft to IP and copyright theft. Barely).
Imagine AI not as a tool, but as a vast, unmapped territory, full of opportunity, unknown hazards, and berries that make you hallucinate. Let’s call it New England the AI Territories.
Just like early explorers in the Americas, we’re stumbling around the AI Territories without a reliable map, means of transportation, or even a clear sense of where we’ve landed. In cybersecurity terms, this looks like red teams probing model boundaries, discovering prompt injections, and performing jailbreaks to find the edges of the terrain.
And history reminds us: early assumptions are often dead wrong. Forts (companies) will be built in dumb places. Defenses (security tools) will fail. And yes, sometimes, some folks still refer to Native Americans as “Indians” because Columbus was spectacularly lost.
We once ended up at a house party in the wrong town because it had the same street address. The elderly couple who answered the door looked confused; we looked mortified. Now imagine doing that but with ships, flags, and an entire continent. Mistakes of that magnitude will be made in the AI Territories.
Cybersecurity in this context demands continuous exploration, adaptive defenses, and a healthy respect for the unknown.
Movie franchise analogy: Aliens.
To sum it up:
AI isn’t just another technology—it’s a brave new world. That makes it a paradigm shift, not just a shiny new tool, or depending on your perspective, toy.
Also, Brave New World? Great book.
(Funny how all our media metaphors for AI keep landing in dystopia, huh? Maybe we should unpack that…)
NOPE. No time. We’re off to vibe-code a newsletter generator.
See you out there.
🕶️ Come Find Us at Black Hat
We’ll be out in Vegas for Black Hat, and two of our team members will be in the spotlight (literally):
Taylor Margot is speaking at the Innovators & Investors Summit on What Your Lawyer and VC Won’t Tell You on Tuesday, August 5th Check it out →
Lucas Nelson is judging the Startup Spotlight Competition on Thursday, August 7th Details here →
If you’ll be there, come say hi. Or just awkwardly lurk nearby and pretend you don’t recognize us. Either way, we’ll take it.
Lastly, if you appreciate our highlighted content, please follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn, where we regularly post about things worthy of attention.
What We're Reading
Here's a curated list of things we found interesting.
It’s Known as ‘The List’—and It’s a Secret File of AI Geniuses
The war for AI talent has just hit ludicrous speed. Stay in school kids!
Only a select few researchers have the skills for the hottest area in tech. Mark Zuckerberg and his rivals want to hire them— even if it takes pay packages of $100 million.
Are machines smarter than venture capitalists?
We don’t mean to brag, but we are much smarter than our toaster, and we are pretty confident we can take our rice maker in a trivia contest. With that said, we have been using AI to create data systems recently, and it’s powerful stuff.
Most VC firms are not yet ditching human experience, but a few pioneers are about to go all in on quant trading.
Impostor uses AI to impersonate Rubio and contact foreign and US officials
This isn’t quite to the level of Sacha Baren Cohen punking world leaders, but it is a sign of things to come.
The State Department is warning U.S. diplomats of attempts to impersonate Secretary of State Marco Rubio and possibly other officials using technology driven by artificial intelligence, according to two senior officials and a cable sent last week to all embassies and consulates.
Transactions
Deals that caught our eye.
Phone unlocking firm Cellebrite to acquire mobile testing startup Corellium for $170M
The Israel-headquartered Cellebrite said the deal would help with the “accelerated identification of mobile vulnerabilities and exploits.” Much of Cellebrite’s technology relies on using unknown vulnerabilities, such as zero-day exploits, to unlock encrypted data stored on phones.
Podcasts
What we’re listening to.
Exploring the Latest Dark Web Onion Sites - John Hammond
This one is a short video exploring the dark web and what sites are available. If you haven’t played with ToR or the dark web this is a nice intro.
Join in on the safari ride to explore the corners and crevices of the internet, looking into the dark web or irregular chat groups to uncover cybercrime!
About Lytical
Lytical Ventures is a New York City-based venture firm investing in Corporate Intelligence, comprising cybersecurity, data analytics, and artificial intelligence. Lytical’s professionals have decades of experience in direct investing generally and in Corporate Intelligence specifically.
