Acquisition Alert: OpenAI & Meta

Key Takeaways

I want to pivot to talking about a space that you spend a lot of time in cyber security. We saw this week that OpenAI is acquiring company called Prompt Fu. Is this a company that that you have followed? Yes, we follow the red teaming vulnerability space very intensely. Cyber a big area of focus for me. I was fortunate to have been a investor in Paul Alter networks and been on the board there for 6 years. What I'll tell you is the bell has rung and the race has begun. Open AI and cyber security are in a collusion course. And to me, open AI buying prompt fu should send shivers down the spine of all cyber companies and other AI models because uh they are showing they are here to play and they're here to win. I I think it's a great move by open AI. >> Shivers down their spine. Say more about that. What do you mean? Well, I just think that when Claude released their product a few weeks ago, you saw cyber security companies take a hit. At that point, it was much more sort of a hey, this is how cloud code could be applied. Uh, but they didn't really have they didn't actually launch out with more detail. What OpenAI is doing is, you know, they are really committing to this cyber security journey and they're showing that they're going to acquire. I I actually think that it means that AI companies are going to start acquiring cyber. So cyber and AI is a pad trade. Every time AI happens, you increase the surface area and you increase the market for cyber. Also bad guys can use AI faster than the good guys can. So for both things, I think AI is a huge tailwind for cyber. But now what open AI is saying is not only are we going to build it, but we're also going to potentially acquire you. So I I do think that this the race has begun and it's going to be a very interesting time to see how cyber companies deal with this AI threat. >> Can you explain to us at a very high level what open AAI is trying to build with its frontier offering and then how this fits into that. >> So I have to say my bias we are we one of the largest investors in anthropic. We are anthropic spend a lot. >> [laughter] >> So, so my my guess is Open AAI is catching up. I mean, Open AI didn't realize how big coding was going to be. CLA took a very early lead. Open AAI is now going with Codeex and trying to catch up. And I think one of the things they realized is that uh Cyber is going to be and especially, you know, clot has been they just published a week ago, maybe two days ago about all the vulnerabilities they found in in browsers, right? And so, OpenAI is trying to have an answer to that. And I think their answer is to acquire prompu so they can start having that cyber functionality built into their model. >> And I I am curious. I mean so let's you are an investor in anthropics. So just help me understand the uh AI cyber security landscape at large. You mentioned you're you're you're watching to see more acquisitions. What pockets of cyber security should we be watching for? So, so I think what AI is going to be really good at is in identifying vulnerabilities. So, in essence already cla shown that I think open AI is showing at and so the opportunity for cyber companies is that once AI identifies vulnerabilities, how can you patch them and remediate them? One of the areas we've been spending a lot of time in is just thinking about how do you do automatic remediation. I think the holy grail for cyber is can you automatically remediate your vulnerabilities in zero days. We've been very fortunate to back some amazing companies including Zaffron that actually help in using AI to automatically remediate your vulnerabilities. >> I I want to turn to a third deal that we are watching this week. >> A lot of news today. I know you're you are our deals correspondent today. So, thank you for thank you for for playing ball with us. So, we had the Axios report this morning that Meta has acquired Moltbook and that they're bringing on uh the the the founders that worked on Moldbook. Molt book Molt Book of course was that agentbased social network that sort of took Silicon Valley by storm and we have of course saw that uh Peter Steinberger from Openclaw was hired by OpenAI. >> Yeah. >> I mean I I just wondered what you thought here. you know, Meta, we're still waiting to see what is what comes out of their super intelligence lab. Um, we saw OpenAI with, you know, working on Sora and their social network. How are you thinking about this? Well, what I'm telling about is that 2026 is going to be the year of agents, right? I mean, if you know, remember earlier this year, Meta also bought Manus, which is a sort of Chinese Singaporean company based out of Singapore that does a bunch of agentic software. With this acquisition, I think Meta is going all in. Now, I might wonder like is Mark quite as happy as Alexander Wong on safe super intelligence. Seems like, you know, he's sending a signal that he wants to diversify his bets, but he >> But but he he just he posted that photo though. Let's let's not for did you see the photo on on threads? >> No, I didn't. Okay. So, I I'm I'm a Twitter guy, so >> Okay. Okay. Okay. Well, let so let's let's just, you know, so let's so there were some there were some rumors online of a riff between Mark and Alexander Wang and he posted a photo on threads him smiling as wide as could be with Alexander Wang saying, "Don't worry guys, it's everything's okay." So [laughter] I I I definitely know Alexander is going to be smiling after that deal. So I'm glad I'm glad Mark is also smiling. But coming back to mold book I do think that what meta is telling you is this is the year of agents essentially agentic frameworks is going to take over and he is trying to I mean I give look I for me Mark and meta uh they're never out uh I think he is committed and he's going to make AI work at meta and in some ways he's got both the capacity the compute and the capital to go out and try to do this and I think this is another step in his direction of building that AI I Arsenal at Meta. >> Right. Great. Well, Many, I want to thank you for coming on. That is Banky Ganason, a partner at Menllo Ventures here on TI TV.