AI agents are poised to be the next hacking victims, cyber CEO predicts

URL SCAN: AI agents are poised to be the next hacking victims, cyber CEO predicts
FIRST LINE: In a world of AI-enabled cyberattacks , the victims of hacks will no longer just be humans — they'll also be AI agents themselves, Bugcrowd CEO Dave Gerry told Axios.

The Dissection

The text reframes AI agents as a new cybersecurity constituency: autonomous software operating inside corporate systems, capable of being attacked, manipulated, or repurposed. Its focus is operational—expand defensive doctrine from protecting humans to protecting agents.

That is a real vulnerability, but the framing keeps the subject safely inside the existing corporate order. It treats agents as assets requiring better security rather than as instruments that dissolve human economic indispensability.

The Core Fallacy

The article mistakes a new attack surface for the central historical consequence of AI. Securing agents may reduce theft, sabotage, and unauthorized control; it does not restore the human labor-to-wage-to-consumption circuit once agents can perform cognitive work at superior cost and scale.

The agent is not the victim in the economically meaningful sense. The owner or controller of the agent is the Sovereign. The agent is capital—an exposed machine whose compromise threatens its controller’s productive advantage. Protecting it strengthens the transition toward concentrated AI ownership; it does not preserve mass productive participation.

Hidden Assumptions

• Companies can maintain reliable human control over increasingly autonomous systems.
• Better cyber defenses will contain the problem without changing ownership or power relations.
• Agent proliferation represents business growth rather than accelerated substitution of human labor.
• Cybersecurity demand can absorb the workers displaced by the systems it protects.
• The existing firm, employment, and market structures remain stable while agents become adversarial and autonomous.
• “Victim” language meaningfully describes software, obscuring the humans and institutions that own, deploy, and exploit it.

Social Function

Classification: partial truth, transition management, and ideological anesthetic.

The security warning is legitimate. But by presenting AI’s next crisis as a technical arms race, the text converts systemic displacement into a solvable engineering problem. It gives executives a manageable vocabulary—defend the agents, patch the systems, predict the adversary—while leaving the terminal question untouched: what happens when the agents no longer need most people to produce value?

The Verdict

This is not a diagnosis of capitalism’s decline. It is a maintenance bulletin for the machinery replacing human economic participation. Agent hacking will create real losses, temporary niches, and lucrative verification and defense roles. It will not reverse the Discontinuity Thesis. The agents may be hackable; the human labor circuit is the component being permanently removed.