Theory Ventures Partner Tomasz Tunguz: Why Attack Parallelization Makes AI Security the Third Product-Market Fit
Programming and customer support were the first two product-market fits in AI; Tomasz Tunguz, a partner at Theory Ventures, considers security to be the third. His core argument is not that AI makes security better, but that attackers' parallelization capabilities have overwhelmed human defenders' response speeds, creating a structural demand for token consumption.
The attack data cited by Tunguz comes from multiple sources. Black Kite reported that ransomware incidents against the financial services sector rose from 156 in 2024 to 202 in 2025, reaching 65 in the first quarter of 2026 alone, a 76% year-over-year increase. Cisco Talos discovered that eight intermediate certificates from eMudhra were compromised, with private keys evaluating to single- or double-digit integers, allowing attackers to impersonate any website or service. StepSecurity tracked 56 supply chain attacks over twelve months, one of which was a five-day campaign that stole 78,330 secrets from 2,186 organizations, including 92 publicly traded companies. These figures are self-reported by various institutions, and Tunguz did not independently verify them.
A key step in the economic mechanism is the collapse of response times. Tunguz wrote that intrusion response times have plummeted from months to minutes, making it impossible for human teams to read every alert at that speed. This forces Security Operations Centers (SOCs) to introduce AI for automated triage. He surveyed 75 enterprise security practitioners, asking how they would allocate their security budgets excluding endpoint security, resulting in five categories: Security Operations Center, SIEM, penetration testing, threat intelligence, and vulnerability management. Each category involves significant token consumption. In penetration testing, models continuously probe every endpoint at a cost far lower than human red teams; in vulnerability management, AI ranks massive scanner findings by reachability and exploitability; in SIEM, analysts query databases in natural language, receiving answers in seconds rather than filing tickets to wait for query writing.
Tunguz quotes OpenAI President Greg Brockman from the October 2026 No Priors podcast:
"Security spend should actually vastly outstrip software spend. Every company needs AI security because attackers can parallelize their efforts." He added that the global cybersecurity market was $175 billion last year, growing 13% annually, noting this figure does not yet include the incremental impact of security entering the token path.
Tunguz himself notes limitations in his survey: the sample of 75 people is largely qualitative, and error bars on charts are significant. His argumentative chain is: attack parallelization → response time collapse → five budget categories must adopt AI → each generates token consumption → security market enters the token path → this constitutes the third PMF. A weak link in this chain is that inertia in existing security budget allocation may not automatically translate into token expenditure simply due to technical feasibility; vendors (including OpenAI) have an incentive to promote this narrative; and the $175 billion figure is a Forrester forecast rather than observed token consumption data. As a General Partner at Theory Ventures, Tunguz has a vested interest in the AI infrastructure narrative.
Sources:Tomasz Tunguz