#103 - Who Wins When AI Attacks AI? with William Wright

This week on GAEA Talks, Graeme Scott sits down with William Wright, an ethical hacker and offensive security specialist whose career has taken him from IT help desks to aircraft carriers, submarines and the UK nuclear deterrent. This is one of the most directly useful and quietly alarming conversations we have recorded.William started in general IT, answering phones and resetting passwords, and worked his way into infrastructure and networking for large organisations. That took him to BAE Systems, working on Ministry of Defence projects including aircraft carriers and minesweepers, then to QinetiQ working on the nuclear deterrent and submarines. He moved to NATO and was cut within a week when they let all contractors go. He landed as lead penetration tester at Unipart, was made redundant again, and decided to build his own company instead. He now runs an offensive security firm from the Hebrides in Scotland, and has just had an agentic offensive security capability accredited.His central argument is that the security landscape has split into two separate worlds. AI versus technology, where machines attack machines at speeds no human can match. And humans versus humans, where social engineering still works exactly as it always has, because people are people. AI versus humans, in his view, is not really happening yet. And that split is the most useful mental model any leader can take away from this episode.The urgent part is what vibe coding is doing. He describes an e-commerce client whose original developer-built application had flaws serious enough to let his team take over the entire company. That same team then vibe coded a replacement, and it was worse. He is now seeing finance databases published to the open web, entire company datasets pushed to public GitHub repositories, and secret keys scattered across the internet at a rate that has forced GitHub to build detection for it. He believes this is heading toward a technological crash within a few years.