Jamie Dimon Tells Leaders to Ramp Up Cyber Defenses

Plus, an Nvidia-backed startup’s new category of AI to cut compute costs

By Steven Rosenbush

Oct. 19, 2026 8:50 am ET

Good morning. Jamie Dimon is warning business leaders to boost their defenses against cybersecurity threats that have mounted with the arrival of powerful new AI models.

“I wrote about cyber this year. I said, and I meant it, it’s our biggest risk. And that was a couple weeks before Mythos. And now it is our biggest risk by far,” Dimon said. The chairman and chief executive of JPMorgan Chase made his remarks in conversation with WSJ Leadership Institute President Alan Murray. You can watch their full discussion on the latest episode of the WSJ Leadership Institute Presents: Leaders podcast. Or you can listen on Apple or Spotify.

AI is driving concerns about cybersecurity to new levels, according to Dimon, who alluded to several developments in the field:Anthropic previewed its Mythos model in April, and at the time declined to release it to the general public given its capability to find and exploit software bugs. In June, Anthropic released Claude Fable 5, a next-generation AI model based on Mythos, to the general public with safety guardrails.
In July, models that escaped from a research network at OpenAI hacked into AI company Hugging Face, The Wall Street Journal reported.

The concerns about security are broader than AI, and include vulnerable undersea cables that provide global connectivity, some of which can’t be backstopped by satellites.

Strengthen defenses now

“There are a lot of things everyone should be doing today. Today,” Dimon said. “You should go back if you haven’t done it and start today. Network segmentation. Identity access management. Use the most powerful AI models you have to look for these vulnerabilities. It will find 20% of them.”

Companies must learn how to patch those vulnerabilities very quickly, and make the effort part of their management meetings, “so if you’re running this part of the company, you know the ones you need to fix.”

Dimon is particularly concerned about risks facing critical infrastructure—and the broad vulnerabilities of complex vendor supply chains.

Dimon temporarily chairs the Alliance for Critical Infrastructure, a coalition of about 50 companies that vets open-source code and strengthens security across a range of sectors.

“There are things people should start today to get ready to prepare for cyber,” Dimon said. “It is really vulnerable, and I don’t think anyone disputes that.”

Coming up: A pivotal week for AI

This week kicks off a pivotal tech earnings season, with Meta Platforms, IBM and SAP all reporting on Wednesday. The results will arrive at a tense time for AI companies, who have come under mounting pressure from investors. Heavily indebted AI cloud companies such as CoreWeave have been hit especially hard.

In the latest blow, Microsoft pulled out of a deal to lease capacity at an Nscale Global Holdings data center in the U.K., citing power-supply constraints. The setback comes as the AI infrastructure company prepares to go public, the WSJ reports.

A new category of AI from Mobileye’s co-founder

Members of the doubleAI team. DOUBLEAI

DoubleAI—a startup co-founded by Amnon Shashua, who also helped launch autonomous driving company Mobileye—is set to debut what it calls a new category of artificial intelligence that promises to lower computing costs.

“More hardware is being built, but the need for compute is rising faster than the ability to build GPUs and CPUs,” Shashua tells the WSJ Leadership Institute’s Belle Lin. “If you can utilize the hardware better, then you can achieve something incredible in terms of savings.”

DoubleAI describes its new category of AI as “code execution models,” or CEMs, which it says put the AI “between code and silicon.” Unlike large language models that can help humans write code, CEMs live inside running programs and operate without human involvement.

“More hardware is being built, but the need for compute is rising faster than the ability to build GPUs and CPUs,” said Shashua, who is also doubleAI’s CEO. “If you can utilize the hardware better, then you can achieve something incredible in terms of savings.”

DoubleAI’s investors include Lightspeed Venture Partners, Bessemer Venture Partners, Nvidia and Dell, and has raised $220 million total.

On Our Radar

• Anthropic plans to commit 5% of it shares to a new “public benefit fund” with the flexibility to make charitable donations or direct money to “specific populations.” The company previously committed $200 million to studying and addressing AI-driven labor market instability, the WSJ reports. Elon Musk in a post on X early Monday followed up with his own charitable offer, pledging “one of my SpaceX shares to every kid in America.” It wasn’t immediately clear how the shares would be distributed.
• China’s Ministry of Commerce on Friday issued a draft plan to add 23 AI-related technologies, including large language models and AI agents, to a list of tech prohibited or restricted from export. The WSJ reported in July that Chinese officials have held discussions with domestic AI labs about how to protect their proprietary technology. In April, China blocked Meta Platforms’ $2 billion acquisition of AI startup Manus on national security grounds.
• AI’s true test may be in better predicting the impacts of this year’s El Niño, already the strongest on record. Multiple groups, from the U.N.’s World Food Program to farmers to hedge funds are leaning in on AI forecasts. The FT reports that some scientists warn that AI models trained on a cooler past may fail to capture how climate change interacts with El Niño. “The future may not be the past,” Ko Barrett, deputy secretary-general of the U.N.’s World Meteorological Organization, tells the FT.
• Quantinuum says it hit a technical milestone addressing the tendency for qubits to produce errors based on tiny disturbances in their environments. The quantum-computing company said that the effort now puts it on a path to achieve fully accurate and reliable quantum computers by 2029.

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