Funding Formal Methods for the Cyberpocalypse

AI capabilities in cybersecurity are advancing rapidly, making offensive hacking easier to execute and automate. As LessWrong contributor Max von Hippel argues, defensive security is structurally harder to improve: open-weight AI models are proliferating, he says, and a teenager with a few hundred dollars could soon attempt heists at nation-state sophistication. Critical infrastructure — from banking to energy to hospitals — faces regulatory and technical barriers that slow security updates. To mitigate this risk, Hippel proposes philanthropic funding for formal methods: mathematical approaches to proving software correctness, applied globally through international research fellowships, bootcamps, and forward-deployed experts hardening vulnerable systems worldwide.

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