AI Agents Are 100x More Dangerous (And Backups Are Your Only Plan B)

Bipul Sinha, Rubrik's CEO, just dropped an alarm that sounds like a disaster movie script—except it's painfully real. AI agents—those autonomous systems that make decisions and act on their own—come with risk inflation he quantifies as "100x greater." That's not a random number. Agents work faster, access more data, and crucially, they don't wait for a human to say yes. If an agent gets compromised, damage doesn't arrive tomorrow—it arrives in milliseconds.

Here's the plot twist though: you can't just fortress everything like it's Fort Knox. Criminals are already inside your networks, they know how to move around, and AI makes them even slicker. That's why Sinha argues cybersecurity strategy needs a complete flip. Instead of obsessing over "keep them out," you need to think: "How fast can I bounce back when they get in?" It's a radical mental shift—from total prevention to fast recovery.

The analogy is straightforward: building taller and taller walls doesn't work if the enemy has a ladder. What works is having solid backups, a disaster recovery plan so fast and reliable that when chaos hits, attackers find a service already back online and can't even figure out what happened.

Rubrik obviously sells backup and recovery solutions (that's their business), but the underlying message is dead serious: companies without a robust Plan B when their AI agents get compromised won't survive the fallout. It's not a matter of "if," it's "when."

The reality is AI is turbocharging the attack lifecycle. Once you had days to respond. Now you've got hours, maybe minutes. Most companies' cybersecurity infrastructure? Still built for the days era. There's your problem.