Palo Alto Networks Goldman Sachs Communacopia + Technology Conference 2026

I like fear-mongering. There's a little bit of a view that I spent eight years trying to convince people cybersecurity is important.

Dario did it in one week. Better than me, clearly. Mithos has been more useful for me as a marketing tool than anything I did for eight years. I hope they have new models which are more capable and scare the out of people.

The flip side of fear-mongering, yeah.

By Palo Alto Networks. Nikesh, please solve this for me.

Well, first of all, lovely to see you guys. Thank you for staying in the room. I saw a lot of people leaving as I was walking in, so I figured nobody was interested in cybersecurity, or anything that needed to be said had already been said so far this conference. Or the bar is open. Any of those above. When CEOs call, more recently, since Mithos, I think we have talked to about 2,000 companies between CEOs, CIOs, and chief security officers. Obviously, they want to know, what is Mithos? How does it impact my life? What do I need to do about it? I think Mithos is the first incarnation of showing us the capabilities of AI and how it can find vulnerabilities in our organization's technology stack.

What would take us weeks or months or things we would not care to go look for, AI can do it pretty quickly. You are suddenly seeing this peak of vulnerability finds. We found 1,200 at Palo Alto when we first tested it, when Mithos came out. It took us three, four months of cleaning to understand which ones are real, which ones are not, and go fix them. Now we are back to a steady state. We find pretty much a few every month like we used to find before Mithos was out. We had to go through a huge learning curve and a discovery phase and fixing it. A lot of companies have not been through that, and what has happened now is Mithos has become available to defenders, so we have a service. We can go to customers and say, "You want us to test you?

We will test you." What is interesting is, I would say 60% of what we found was through Mithos, 30-odd percent using OpenAI, and 10% using other models. We actually have to use a multi-model harness to find all the vulnerabilities that current AI will help you find, as opposed to using any one single model. That is what we are doing. Very quickly, that conversation evolves. That is great. What does this mean for the future? How do I make sure that I can respond to finding vulnerabilities quicker? What do I need to do to my tech stack to make sure that I can find attackers quickly in my infrastructure and fix it before the shit hits the fan? That is usually when the platform conversation begins and the SIEM conversations begin, and we start telling them, "Stop upgrading your stack in a multi-vendor solution.