CYBERSECURITY

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Depending on how they use it, AI may alleviate cybersecurity professionals’ workplace stress—or make it worse.

According to a July ISC2 study, 48% of cybersecurity pros said AI lowered their stress at work, while just under one-third (32%) said the technology either slightly or significantly heightened that stress.

The findings were based on a May survey of 856 cybersecurity professionals who use AI in their roles.

Caring too much. There were clear distinctions between the two groups of respondents. Those with increased anxiety from AI, for example, were more likely to spend additional time reviewing and validating AI outputs, and deciding when to trust an AI recommendation.

“That’s a stressor because it’s not something we potentially had to do, and hence a little bit tricky,” ISC2 CISO Jon France told IT Brew. “In the general market, there is some guidance, but there’s not a track record of, ‘How do you do that?’ and, ‘What does good output look like?’ compared to poor output?’”

Output shifts.—BM

      

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SOFTWARE

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Like Voltron, some of the biggest names in tech are deciding the best way to secure their infrastructure against AI-powered attacks is to bond together into a giant robot open-source alliance.

On Monday, Nvidia announced the Open Secure AI Alliance. In addition to Nvidia, membership includes IBM, Hugging Face, Palantir, OpenClaw, ServiceNow, Red Hat, and others. The goal: ensure that cybersecurity pros have open-source tools and techniques that they can use to secure infrastructure and find vulnerabilities, particularly as malicious AI expands the collective attack surface.

This announcement follows an open letter from some members of the alliance, alongside others, regarding concerns around potential bans on open-weight models.

Allies, unite!—CN

      

CYBERSECURITY

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Another day, another joint venture in the cybersecurity industry with a goal of bolstering enterprise AI security.

Earlier this month, Red Hat announced the formation of asago (short for AI Safety And Governance Orchestration), an open-source community that will help automate AI governance policies into “product-ready, safely deployed AI systems.”

Stuart Battersby, AI safety and model evaluation architect at Red Hat, told IT Brew that while the landscape of AI safety tools has matured, organizations still struggle with “slow processes” when translating AI policies into working software configurations.

“We’ve hit this inflection point where we have good AI safety tooling, but actually now what we need to do is make that AI safety tooling much more accessible to a wider business community that needs to be able to consume those things,” Battersby said. The purpose of asago is to help enterprises take AI policies to production “without needing to be experts in AI safety.”

Added expertise.—BM

      

patch notes

Francis Scialabba

Today’s top IT reads.

Stat: $13 billion. That’s the valuation for European vibe-coding startup Lovable. (the Wall Street Journal)

Quote: “Technology is always changing, and we’re always looking for practical ways to improve how government works.”—Bill Traverse, Barnstable County IT director, after the small community won third place in the 2026 Digital Counties Survey (Barnstable County)

Read: McDonald’s uses data to build customer dossiers—for one writer, it ran 515 pages. (Wired)

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Quiz

Amelia Kinsinger

The week’s biggest IT stories—now in quiz form. Test yourself on the latest cybersecurity headlines, software news, and tech breakthroughs in a quick, competitive challenge built for IT pros. Challenge your coworkers and see how your score stacks up!

Jobs

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