Wiz Co-Founder Says AI Is Forcing a Full Reset in Cybersecurity

After Wiz’s huge sale to Google for $32 billion, co-founder and CTO Ami Luttwak said the company’s mission has not changed, even after the exit. Speaking one-on-one with Globes tech editor Asaf Gilad at the TECH IL conference, he said Wiz, founded in 2020, set out to revolutionize security and that the product is now used by every country in the world. He also noted that this was not his first exit, recalling that Adallom was sold in 2015.

Luttwak said post-exit life looks essentially the same, because he still gets up, takes the train and focuses on changing cybersecurity. He said the industry had long been built on the wrong assumptions and that “everything we did until today in cyber has to change.” In his view, AI is moving far faster than many expected and may already outperform the best humans in some vulnerability work, forcing a rethink of core security practices.

He said Google mattered to the deal because Wiz needed access to Gemini and Google’s AI capabilities to take the company “to the next level.” Luttwak described AI as an arms race in which the same tools help both defenders and attackers, but said companies that fail to react quickly will be left behind. “Any company that does not respond very, very fast now will be irrelevant,” he warned, adding that response time must shrink from about a month to hours.

Asked what legacy security firms should do, he said they must adapt constantly and stop relying on static defenses like firewalls. He said AI models should be treated as critical infrastructure, like cloud services, and argued that Israel has not done enough in AI. On the local tech scene, he said technical skill alone is no longer enough, because anyone can build something quickly now. Startups must reach real sales, and early founders should go straight to market and aim for millions in revenue.