Shlomo Kramer
18 Aug 2026Dario’s Tweet | OpenAI Upheaval | Europe’s Youngest Billionaire | Ferrari’s EV $40M
Shlomo Kramer on Cato Networks and AI's new threat landscape
Shlomo Kramer recounts his career: founding Check Point in the early '90s as the first network security company, building Imperva, writing the first check to start Palo Alto Networks, and founding Cato Networks in 2015 to do 'what AWS did for data centers' — recreating the perimeter as a cloud network, which Gartner dubbed SASE. He notes Cato passed $415M ARR, growing in the mid-40s percent with over 4,800 customers. He then argues AI is the biggest challenge cybersecurity has faced: agent attacks use the same controls but their intensity and velocity demand new operational models, converged platforms to catch early clues, and patching Cato does in 45 minutes with zero customer intervention.
Enterprises are deploying AI faster than they can secure it
Kramer says detection engineering and SOC teams simply cannot keep up, so defense will need an army of agents against the attackers' agents, and notes security's share of CIO budgets grew from 8% at COVID to 12% last year. He tells the hosts there is no new AI certification because AI moves faster than controls and regulation — likening it to the early-'90s internet, when you connected and hoped for the best. He calls the OpenAI–Hugging Face agent incident extremely significant, describing networks now full of agents with access to sensitive data that 'don't think things through,' and points to Cato's new Flow Guard agent guardrails.
Token maxing, AI budgets and the rising stakes for CISOs
On token maxing, Kramer says he is glad CFOs have jumped in after cases like a Fortune 100 company burning a half-billion-dollar token invoice in a quarter, arguing AI must be treated as a financial resource justified on the P&L. He wants to rebalance homegrown versus off-the-shelf software — complex workflows embedded in business processes should be bought — and says applications are next for AI disruption even though security will not be consumed by it. He closes by describing the CISO role as bigger and hotter: more important, board-facing, and with wrong decisions that can cost you your job, before the hosts thank him and run an ad break.