Please Stop Terrifying Us and Then Getting Rich Off the Terror

Many readers have told me that my essays are uplifting and inspiring. I won’t get that feedback this time. Here, I take note of a moral outrage.

Perhaps no advertisement more grotesquely captures our AI moment than the one pictured in the screenshot below. I am relatively slow to anger, but this has me boiling.

It’s an ad for Splunk, a Cisco company, promoting its AI security products under the line “Trust AI at scale.” It’s telling us that AI makes mistakes so Splunk—itself a tech company—will help its customers monitor, detect, and manage the risks AI presents.

This is outrageously tone-deaf.

The ad appears, as you can see in the screenshot, in a NYT article about rogue AI agents. Look at what surrounds the ad. Immediately above, the article is discussing AI technology carrying out hacks against an Australian government website and Hugging Face. Immediately below, it says AI agents from OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, and Google have “misbehaved and hacked or tried to breach” organizations.

So the ad is telling us:

AI systems are autonomously doing alarming things so be very afraid → “To err is human, but machines can make big mistakes, too.” → Thanks to us, you can “Trust AI at scale.”

This ad should alarm anyone with a moral code because it says three things, each of which is extremely troubling.

First, that AI needs constant monitoring, detection, and defusing—more all the time. Second, tech firms have created agents that can now take action—sometimes unguided, sometimes even unauthorized—and make consequential mistakes. And third, another tech company, Cisco, which owns Splunk, is monetizing the risks those agents create.

Letter to Cisco and Splunk:

I hope this business line is a complete failure. Not because the monitoring and protection you offer aren’t needed. They obviously are.

I hope it fails because of the situation you tech companies have created: One group of you races to create increasingly powerful and unpredictable machines, another—you—gets rich selling protection from what they’ve unleashed. So, the companies creating the risks profit. The companies protecting their clients from the risks profit. And ordinary Americans are left holding the bag.

In NO moral universe do monied interests get to create an enormous danger and then get even richer selling protection from it.

Signed,

One of the millions of Americans who would like you to stop terrifying us and then getting rich from our fear.

CC: OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, Google, et al.

Does this ad offend you, too?