Red Team Part 2: Incumbents Crumble, Startups Rise - The AI Security Power Shift

Offensive AI has changed the game. The incumbents no longer have the edge. Open Code Mission understands this and has architected and is delivering the future right before your eyes.

The Delta Widens

As I outlined in the first article on the NIST paper, a widening delta now exists between offensive AI attack vectors and defensive AI countermeasures. The incumbents, once thought untouchable, are stuck in legacy thinking. Their edge defenses and "inside the walls" mitigations are built on an outdated view of cybersecurity, blind to the velocity of offensive AI unfolding right now.

Why Incumbents Are Failing

Enterprises relying on these giants are exposed for three reasons:

• Old Paradigms: They are still defending with yesterday's cyber playbook.
• Business Transformation Failures: Large-scale "lights off, lights on" transformations rarely succeed, leaving enterprises unable to pivot at speed.
• False Reassurances: Many incumbents downplay exposure until a spectacular breach makes the truth undeniable.

Standards, policies, and compliance frameworks won't close this gap. Enforcement has consistently failed in practice.

The Startup Advantage

For the first time in two generations, the advantage lies with startups and novel entrants. Why?

• They aren't dragging legacy licensing models or outdated architectures into the AI security domain.
• They can move quickly, building defensive AI models inherently, rather than retrofitting controls as an afterthought.
• They can exploit the fact that incumbents cannot transform at an enterprise scale fast enough.
• This is a once-in-a-generation market reset, a chance for startups with elegant solutions to dislodge the "immovable."
• That is what Open Code Mission is doing, and our phones are ringing day and night.

The False AI Bubble Narrative

Despite Gartner, Forrester, and now Altman suggesting an "AI bubble" (1% enterprise adoption, ~60% failure rates), this framing is wrong. It's not a bubble; it's the trough of disillusionment for one very narrow aspect of AI: LLMs.

A Security Crisis Can't Be A Bubble

Why? Because it is based on business realities and actual real-life impact. Not ChatGPT versus Grok versus Claude versus Deepseek or debates on X Spaces about "are they aliveeeeee".

Who cares? LLMs are commoditized. All the big players have clustered around a general area of performance. No one has yet reached this PR & Marketing hype game of achieving AGI, nor will they.

AI as WMD

Hobbyists, small software houses, and multi-agent systems are flooding enterprises with generative and predictive AI models riddled with blind spots. Developers under pressure are embedding stopgap controls that open new attack vectors. Meanwhile, the incumbents are still peddling confidence while standing on obsolete ground.

Conclusion

The conclusion is stark: policy alone won't save us. Defensive AI must be built into the fabric of generative and predictive systems themselves. Until then, enterprises remain exposed, and the real winners will be the startups that understand this truth.

Open Code Mission understands this and has architected and is delivering the future right before your eyes.