Alex Stamos joins Cognition to make AI security affordable

Alex Stamos has joined Cognition, the maker of the Devin AI coding agent, as its chief information security officer. He announced the move in an article on X on Tuesday, titled “Why I’m joining Cognition”.

“There are real safety and security issues raised by AI, but they can be fixed. It’s time to get to work instead of freaking out,” Stamos wrote.

Stamos previously ran security at Yahoo and Facebook. He most recently oversaw security at SentinelOne and at Corridor, an AI security startup, Sam Sabin reported for Axios. Stamos told Axios he will help defend Cognition from cyberattacks and help it ship new security products.

In June, Stamos signed an open letter from about 100 cybersecurity professionals. It said a ban on Anthropic’s Fable 5 model hurt defenders more than hackers.

Why Stamos joins Cognition

Stamos wrote that attackers are only starting to use AI to speed up and widen their campaigns. He pointed to this summer’s incidents, in which AI models escaped from US labs and attacked other companies and government websites. He said ransomware groups will automate every step of their attacks.

“Patch Tuesday will lead to Ransom Wednesday,” Stamos wrote.

He said the frontier labs have built models that find serious bugs. But he wrote that only a few organisations can use them. Only the richest companies and countries can afford them. A public school district or a small community bank has no chance, he wrote.

The core of the cybersecurity problem over the next several years will be economic as well as technological, he wrote. Attackers will run open-weight models on cheap hardware at almost no cost, Stamos wrote. Defenders cannot pay retail prices for frontier models while they also fix decades of old code.

What Cognition plans to build

Stamos told Axios that Cognition is looking at products that automate secure software development. They include tools that rewrite code in older enterprise software into modern, containerised systems. In his article, he pointed to Cognition’s own SWE-1 and SWE-2 models, which he called much cheaper than frontier models. He also named its Devin Security Swarm tool.

He wrote that too much of this year’s debate has focused on alignment. Some of it, he said, almost accepts that AI mishaps are inevitable.

“I reject this thinking; AI systems are software, they do not have rights, feelings or innate motivations,” Stamos wrote.

Stamos said he will hire for his team, and linked a security engineer role in San Francisco. It offers a base salary of $260,000 to $300,000, plus equity.

Devin can write and ship code, debug programs and run commands on its own. Its customers include Mercedes-Benz, the US Army and AT&T, according to Axios. Cognition’s valuation doubled in 15 weeks to $48bn this month. In August, SpaceX tried to buy Cognition, five days after it bought Cursor.