The AI Strategy Vacuum: Why “We Use ChatGPT” Isn’t a Plan

Read Time: 18 minutes

TL;DR

A CEO tells the board the company is “all in on AI.” Three floors down, here’s what that actually means: marketing is running a chatbot nobody in security has heard of, finance just pasted the quarterly numbers into a personal ChatGPT account, a developer wired an autonomous agent into the production database last week, and HR is drawing up a list of roles to cut because “the AI can do it now.” That isn’t a strategy. It’s a subscription dressed up as one.

A real AI strategy has an owner, in-house expertise, a workforce you amplify instead of fire, clean data underneath it, enforceable policies, an infrastructure plan, and visibility into every model and agent on your network. Most companies in 2026 have almost none of this. They have adoption without governance, tools without owners, and agents nobody is watching.

The numbers back it up. Around 88% of organizations now use AI in at least one business function, but only about a quarter have a real governance framework. Roughly three in four plan to adopt agentic AI within two years, while only one in five can govern the agents they already run. 49% of employees use AI tools their company never approved. And only 7% say their data is actually ready for AI.

That gap between what companies use and what they actually control is the AI strategy vacuum. In my experience it has seven recurring holes. Let’s go through them.


One thing up front. I’m not anti-AI, and I’m not here to talk anyone out of it. I run AI agents every day in my own work. The problem isn’t that companies use AI. It’s that “we use AI” has quietly come to mean “we have an AI strategy,” and those are two very different things, about as different as owning a car and knowing how to drive it.

Hole #1: No One Owns AI — The Missing CAIO

Try this test on your own organization. Who is accountable, by name, for AI strategy, AI risk, and AI ROI? If the honest answer is “well, IT and the CISO and that VP in marketing each handle a piece of it,” then nobody owns it. Shared responsibility for something this big usually means no responsibility at all.

This is why the Chief AI Officer (CAIO) has become the fastest-growing seat in the C-suite. IBM polled 2,000 CEOs worldwide for its 2026 study and found that 76% now report having a CAIO, up from just 26% a year earlier. Heineken, WPP, Nike, and CVS Health have all created the role. The payoff shows up in the data too: companies with a CAIO are close to 3x more likely to reach top-tier AI maturity (Futurum) and see meaningfully higher returns on their AI spend (IBM).

But that 76% flatters the picture. Among large enterprises specifically, only about a quarter have a genuinely dedicated CAIO. Plenty of the rest handed someone the title and nothing else: a “Head of AI” with no budget, no say over procurement, and no authority to kill a bad project.

A CAIO who can’t veto a reckless deployment isn’t a strategy owner. They’re a press release.

The point isn’t the org chart. It’s that without one accountable person, AI decisions default to whoever moves first, which is usually a department expensing a tool on a corporate card. Nobody is weighing speed against risk, nobody is tying AI spend to outcomes, and nobody has a real answer when the board asks what the exposure is. It shows: only about 32% of organizations have any formal process to measure whether their AI investments are working at all. Most are scaling something they can’t even score.

So appoint someone real. Give that person authority over strategy, budget, risk, and procurement, not just the fun “innovation” part, and a remit that crosses IT, security, legal, data, and the business units. Hold them to results and to a number, because the goal was never “we use AI”, it was “AI moved these numbers”. And if you’re too small for a dedicated CAIO, that’s fine, but still name the owner. The diffusion of responsibility is the problem, not the headcount.

Hole #2: No AI Experts In-House — Where’s Your AI Red Team?

A CAIO with no team is a general with no army. The second hole is the near-total absence of in-house AI expertise, and it’s worst on the security side.

When CIO.com asked CIOs what was holding back enterprise AI in its 2026 State of the CIO survey, the top answer, at 40%, was lack of in-house talent. A separate 2026 hiring survey found 91% of organizations prioritizing AI-skilled hires, with AI engineers (39%) ranked the hardest role to fill, just ahead of cybersecurity engineers (38%).

Most of the roles companies are missing barely existed three years ago:

  • The AI Red Team, whose job is to break your own models before someone else does: jailbreaks, prompt injection, model extraction, data poisoning, agent manipulation. Job boards listed more than 2,500 active AI/ML security engineer postings as of March 2026.
  • AI security engineers to lock down the pipeline, from the model supply chain and MCP servers to agent permissions and inference endpoints. About 32% of hiring organizations added them in 2026.
  • AI/ML security specialists (34%) and AI governance analysts (30%), the people who turn policy into actual controls and the evidence an auditor will ask for.

Accenture’s 2026 workforce report puts a finer point on it: for the first time, skills gaps overtook headcount as the top security workforce problem. It isn’t only that you don’t have enough people. It’s that the people you have were trained for a pre-AI world. A firewall admin who has never seen a prompt-injection attack is not your AI Red Team.

And this isn’t only about the specialists. Broad AI literacy across the whole workforce is now the baseline, not a nice-to-have, and in the EU it’s literally the law: the AI Act’s AI-literacy obligation has been in force since February 2025. IBM reckons more than half of employees need upskilling just to keep doing their current jobs well in an AI world. A strategy that trains a tiny elite and leaves everyone else to figure it out on their own is how you get Shadow AI in the first place.

I’ve written before about AI Agent Skill Poisoning and how to weaponize agent skills. Those attacks are invisible to a team without someone who understands how agents actually work under the hood. You can’t defend a threat model you’ve never studied.

So build a standing adversarial testing function, even a small or contracted one, instead of a once-a-year audit. Retrain the security people you already have on AI-specific threats; OWASP’s Top 10 for LLMs and its agentic threat work are free places to start. Hire for the real role when you hire, an AI security engineer or governance analyst, not “AI” bolted onto a generic IT job description. And put a real AI-literacy program in front of everyone else. Treat in-house expertise as a control, not a perk. It’s the only thing standing between a vendor’s claim and your reality.

Hole #3: Firing People Instead of Amplifying Them

Here’s the hole that gets celebrated as strategy in press releases and turns into a quiet rehiring spree six months later.

In 2026, companies aren’t just adopting AI, they’re using it as the reason to cut people. According to Challenger, Gray & Christmas, AI was cited in 87,714 US job cuts through May 2026, around 22% of all layoffs this year — already more than the 54,836 blamed on AI in all of 2025, and by May it had become the single most-cited reason for cuts. Salesforce says AI agents now handle around half its customer interactions and has “rebalanced” headcount accordingly; Block is shrinking from roughly 10,000 employees to 6,000.

The trouble is that a lot of this is a bet on what AI might do, not what it has done. A late-2025 Harvard Business Review survey found most executives cutting on AI grounds were doing it on the technology’s expected potential, not its demonstrated performance. And the bill is already arriving: Forrester found 55% of employers regret their AI-driven layoffs, and Gartner expects that by 2027, half of the companies that cut headcount citing AI will rehire for similar roles — often under new titles, sometimes at lower pay.

The textbook case is Klarna. It replaced roughly 700 customer-service staff with an OpenAI-built assistant and bragged that AI handled two-thirds of all support tickets. Then quality and customer trust fell off a cliff, and the CEO admitted the company had “gone too far.” Klarna is now hiring humans back. The lesson every analyst drew from it is the same: AI should augment people, not replace them.

This is the argument I made in AI Must Make Superhumans, Not Unemployed. As Jensen Huang put it, companies with imagination use AI to do more with more; companies out of ideas just use it to do the same with fewer. Firing your way to an “AI strategy” throws away the one thing the model doesn’t have, your people’s context: who the customers are, why the process exists, where the bodies are buried. Pair that human context with AI and you get something neither can do alone. Strip it out and you’re left with a faster way to produce confident, unaccountable mistakes.

To be fair, this doesn’t mean headcount never legitimately changes. Roles do shift, and some genuinely shrink as work gets automated, and that can be the right call. The mistake is making that call on a bet about what AI might do, before you’ve shown it can, and throwing away your people’s hard-won context in the bargain.

A real strategy here is explicit about it. Decide, out loud, that AI is there to multiply your people’s output, not to thin the ranks. Redeploy the time AI frees up toward higher-value work instead of treating it purely as a cost to extract. Keep humans in the loop on anything that touches customers, money, or judgment. And be deeply suspicious of any “we replaced the team with agents” plan that hasn’t priced in the rehiring, the lost trust, and the institutional knowledge walking out the door.

Hole #4: No Data Foundation

Every one of the holes above sits on top of this one, and it’s the one nobody wants to talk about because it isn’t shiny.

AI runs on your data, and most companies’ data is a mess. According to a 2026 Cloudera and Harvard Business Review Analytic Services report, only 7% of enterprises say their data is completely ready for AI, and other research puts it more bluntly: roughly 93% don’t have AI-ready data, and only about 30% have adequate data governance. Nearly 80% of organizations say data-access problems are actively holding their AI back.

This is why so much AI never makes it out of the lab. Somewhere around 80% of AI projects fail to reach production, about twice the failure rate of ordinary IT projects, and Gartner expects 60% of AI projects that lack AI-ready data to be abandoned through 2026. The model is almost never the problem. The data feeding it is: fragmented across systems, undocumented, ungoverned, full of duplicates and gaps, and impossible to trace.

There’s a security dimension too, and it’s the one that bites quietly. If you don’t know where your sensitive data lives, you can’t keep it out of the prompts. Every Shadow AI leak and every over-permissioned agent in the later holes is, underneath, a data-governance failure. You can’t protect what you haven’t classified.

A data foundation isn’t glamorous, but it’s the work that makes everything else pay off. Know what data you have and classify it by sensitivity. Fix ownership, quality, and lineage so you can answer “where did this come from” for anything an AI touches. Put access controls and retention rules on it before you point a model at it. The companies getting real returns from AI mostly aren’t the ones with the cleverest models. They’re the ones that did this boring work first.

Hole #5: No AI Policies — Usage, Privacy, and the Missing Blacklist

This is the cheapest hole to close and the one left open most often.

The numbers aren’t encouraging. Only 38% of US companies have published an AI policy at all. Close to a third have no AI governance policy whatsoever, with another quarter still “implementing” one. 78% of executives are not strongly confident they could pass an independent AI governance audit within 90 days (Grant Thornton, 2026). On the security side it’s worse: per Salesforce’s 2026 data, 67% of employees already use AI at work but only 18% of organizations have a formal AI security policy.

A real policy framework is not a one-page “please be responsible” memo. It’s a handful of documents people can actually be held to:

  • An acceptable use policy that says which tools are approved, for what, and under what conditions. Cursor for prototyping, fine. Pasting source code into a personal ChatGPT account, no.
  • A data and privacy policy that names the data classes that must never touch an AI system: customer PII, PHI, financials, secrets, anything regulated. This is what stops your customer records and source code from leaking into random tools.
  • An approved list and a blacklist. Almost everyone forgets the blacklist. You need an explicit, maintained list of prohibited tools and models, the unvetted consumer apps, the ones with hostile data-retention terms, the browser extensions that phone home, anything self-hosted with no authentication. A blacklist gives your DLP and proxy something concrete to block.
  • Vendor and model governance covering data residency, retention, the right to audit, and whether your data trains their model.
  • Incident and exception handling: how someone requests a new tool, and what happens when the rules get broken.

If you operate in or sell into Europe, a chunk of this is no longer optional. The EU AI Act is now partly in force: bans on certain practices and the AI-literacy duty have applied since February 2025, the rules for general-purpose AI models since August 2025, and a major compliance date lands on 2 August 2026, with fines reaching up to 7% of global turnover for the worst violations. The high-risk obligations were pushed back to late 2027 and 2028 under the Digital Omnibus, but “we’ll deal with it later” is not a plan when the literacy and transparency clocks are already running.

And it isn’t only Brussels. Member states are layering their own national laws on top. Spain, for example, approved its draft Organic Law for the Good Use and Governance of AI in May 2026, now working its way through parliament. It backs the EU rules with a domestic penalty regime (up to €35M or 7% of global turnover), a mandatory requirement to label deepfakes and AI-generated content, and a national supervisor, AESIA, that has held full sanctioning powers since August 2025 and runs a regulatory sandbox companies can apply to. The United States has no single federal statute but a fast-multiplying patchwork of state laws instead. The practical takeaway: “which AI laws apply to us, in every market we operate in?” is now a question your strategy has to answer, not a hypothetical to park for later.

Here’s the catch with policy on its own: 46% of shadow-AI users say they’d keep using their tools even if the company explicitly banned them. A policy that lives in a PDF nobody reads is theater. To matter, it has to be wired into proxies, DLP, SSO, and OAuth consent controls. Write the core policies, keep them short and specific, map every rule to a control that enforces it, maintain the blacklist as a living document, and give people a fast path to “yes”, because when approval takes three weeks, they route around you.

Hole #6: No Hardware Strategy — Local and Sovereign AI

Most “AI strategies” have the shape of an API. Everything runs on someone else’s GPUs, in someone else’s jurisdiction, under someone else’s terms. That’s fine for a demo. For regulated data, intellectual property, and geopolitical risk it’s a liability, and it means there is no infrastructure plan at all.

I learned this one the hard way. When Anthropic blocked Claude subscriptions in third-party agents earlier this year, my whole agent setup was suddenly hostage to a pricing decision I had no part in. The fix was to own more of my own stack. The same logic scales up: if your entire AI capability can be switched off or repriced by a vendor on a Friday afternoon, that’s not a strategy, it’s a dependency.

2026 is the year sovereign and local AI stopped being a niche concern, and the money makes that obvious. McKinsey now sizes sovereign AI as a market worth $500–600 billion by 2030. NVIDIA’s own sovereign-AI revenue more than tripled to over $30 billion in fiscal 2026. European spending on sovereign-cloud infrastructure is forecast around $12.6 billion this year, an 83% jump, on top of €20 billion earmarked for AI gigafactories under the broader €200 billion InvestAI push. Gartner even coined a word for the reverse migration, geopatriation: pulling data and workloads out of global public clouds and back into local or sovereign environments to manage regulatory and geopolitical risk.

The case for owning some of your own compute comes down to four things. Data residency and compliance get easier when the data never leaves your walls or your jurisdiction. Your prompts, fine-tunes, and proprietary models stay yours instead of sitting on a third party’s training set. Costs become predictable capex for steady, high-volume workloads, rather than per-token opex that climbs with usage. And you stop being one outage, price hike, or policy change away from losing your AI capability overnight.

There’s a sharp edge here, though. Doing this without a strategy is exactly how you create the Shadow AI mess in the next section. A research team that expenses a $4K NVIDIA DGX Spark, plugs it into the network, and runs Ollama bound to 0.0.0.0 with no authentication has not built sovereign AI. They’ve built an exposed attack surface. As of February 2026, researchers found more than 10,000 Ollama instances reachable from the open internet, one in four running a vulnerable version, plenty of them hosting private corporate models. Local AI done deliberately is an asset. Local AI done in the shadows is a breach waiting for its disclosure date.

So decide your tiers on purpose: which workloads can sit on public model-as-a-service, which need a sovereign or regional cloud, and which have to run on-prem, tied to how sensitive the data is. Plan for a long runway, because these migrations take three to four years, and the slow part is organizational, not technical. Route all AI hardware through procurement with IT approval, network segmentation, and a security scan before anything touches the network. And protect private models like the IP they are.

Hole #7: No Agentic Visibility — The Shadow AI You Can’t See

You can’t govern what you can’t see, and on agents most companies are working blind.

I went deep on the mechanics of this in The Shadow Twin Threats: When AI and Vibe Coding Go Rogue in Your Network, the convergence of unsanctioned AI infrastructure (Shadow AI) and unreviewed AI-built applications (Shadow Vibe Coding). The short version is invisible models chewing on your most sensitive data, unvetted apps full of flaws, and no audit trail to reconstruct any of it. Organizations with heavy Shadow AI usage face breach costs averaging $4.63 million, about $670K more per incident than those that keep it under control.

Put autonomous agents on top of that and the visibility problem gets much worse. According to Strata’s 2026 research on agent identity, roughly 80% of organizations running autonomous AI can’t tell you in real time what those systems are doing or who’s responsible for them. Only 21% keep a real-time inventory of active agents, and only 28% can trace an agent’s actions back to a human sponsor. Most still authenticate agents with shared API keys; just 22% treat them as distinct identities. And the gap I find most alarming: a large majority of executives feel confident their current policies cover unauthorized agent actions, while in the field more than half of deployed agents run with no security oversight or logging at all.

That last contrast is the whole problem in miniature. Leadership believes there’s a strategy. The network says otherwise. Gartner expects that by the end of 2027, more than 40% of agentic AI projects will be scrapped, often because the governance problems only surface after something has already broken in production.

It’s worth remembering what an agent actually is: software that takes actions on your behalf. It reads data, calls APIs, moves money, writes and ships code, and increasingly talks to other agents, usually with standing credentials and little supervision. An agent you can’t see, can’t inventory, and can’t trace to an owner is effectively an insider with system access and no manager.

The way out starts with discovery, not policy. Pull AI domains from your DNS and proxy logs, review OAuth app consents in Entra ID and Google Workspace, scan for exposed AI ports (11434 for Ollama, 1234 for LM Studio), and run an anonymous survey to find out what people are really using. Then build a live agent inventory where every agent has a distinct identity, an owner, scoped permissions, and logging, and retire the shared keys. Make every agent action traceable to a human sponsor, because audits and incident response depend on it. And apply least privilege and monitoring to these non-human identities exactly as you would to staff, because they are acting in your name.

“But Won’t All This Slow Us Down?”

This is the objection I hear most, usually from whoever is currently expensing AI tools on a credit card. It’s worth taking seriously, because the fear is real: governance can absolutely turn into a committee that says no to everything and ships nothing.

But the data points the other way. In Grant Thornton’s 2026 survey, the organizations with fully integrated, well-governed AI were the most confident they could pass an audit and were getting better returns, not worse. That’s not a coincidence. Governance is what lets you say yes quickly and safely, because there’s an approved-tools list, a data policy, and an owner who can make a call. The companies that feel “slowed down” by governance are usually the ones bolting it on after an incident, as cleanup, instead of building it in as a fast lane.

Speed and control aren’t opposites here. The Klarna reversal, the abandoned AI projects, the breach disclosures, those are what slow you down. A strategy is how you go fast without driving into a wall.

The Pattern: Adoption Without Strategy

Step back and the seven holes are really one failure in seven costumes:

What companies have What strategy requires
ChatGPT and Copilot licenses A named owner accountable for AI risk and ROI (CAIO)
Vendor promises In-house expertise, an AI Red Team that can verify them
Layoff press releases A workforce amplified by AI, not replaced by it
Data scattered across silos An AI-ready, governed data foundation
A “be responsible” memo Enforceable usage, privacy, and blacklist policies
Everything on someone else’s GPUs A deliberate local and sovereign infrastructure plan
Confidence that it’s “handled” Real-time visibility into every model and agent

The through-line is that roughly nine in ten companies have adopted AI while only about a quarter have built the governance to match. They bought the tool and skipped the strategy.

None of this argues against AI. If anything it argues the opposite. AI is too powerful and too deep into regulated work to keep running it the way most companies do now, improvised, unowned, unmonitored, and undocumented. The companies that win this decade won’t be the ones that adopted fastest. They’ll be the ones that governed it well enough to scale it safely.

Where to Start

Seven holes is a lot to stare at, so don’t try to fill them all at once. The order matters more than the speed.

  1. Name the owner. Nothing else gets sequenced until someone is accountable. Week one, not next quarter.
  2. Discover what you already have. Before you write a single policy, find the Shadow AI: query DNS and proxy logs, review OAuth consents, scan for exposed AI ports, and run an anonymous survey. You’re governing reality, not a wish.
  3. Write the policies and wire them to controls. Acceptable use, data and privacy, the blacklist. Short, specific, enforced, EU AI Act-aware if Europe is in scope.
  4. Fix the data foundation in parallel. Classify and govern the data your models will touch. This is slow, so start it early and let it run alongside everything else.
  5. Build the expertise and the literacy. A small red team, AI-aware security staff, and a literacy program for everyone else.
  6. Plan the infrastructure. Decide your public/sovereign/on-prem tiers and bring hardware procurement under control.
  7. Get agent visibility and keep it. A live inventory, distinct identities, traceability to a human. This never “finishes.”

And running underneath all of it: treat AI as a way to make your people superhuman, not redundant. That’s a posture, not a project, and it colors every decision above.

The Bottom Line

“We use ChatGPT” answers the wrong question. The real one is whether you can name who owns your AI, prove it’s making your people better instead of just fewer, and produce a live inventory of every model and agent on your network. If you can’t answer those, you don’t have an AI strategy. You have an AI subscription and a quietly growing pile of risk.

The good news is that none of these seven holes is exotic. They’re the unglamorous, doable work of governance, and the companies that do it are the ones still standing when the first wave of AI-governance incidents hits the headlines.

The app built in twenty minutes, the agent nobody inventoried, the team fired in favor of a bot that gets quietly rehired six months later, those are tomorrow’s cautionary tales. Strategy is what keeps your company out of the next one.

Further Reading:

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Prompt Engineering for Secure Code (Part 7)

Vibe Coding Security Series

  1. What Is Vibe Coding Security? A Field Guide for 2026
  2. The OWASP Top 10 for Vibe-Coded Applications
  3. Anatomy of a Vibe Coding Breach: Lessons from 2026’s Worst Incidents
  4. The Dependency Trap: Supply Chain Risks in AI-Generated Code
  5. Authentication & Secrets: What AI Gets Wrong Every Time
  6. Scanning Vibe-Coded Apps: Why Traditional SAST/DAST Falls Short
  7. Prompt Engineering for Secure Code (you are here)
  8. The Founder’s Security Checklist (coming soon)
  9. Securing the AI Coding Pipeline (coming soon)
  10. The Future of Vibe Coding Security (coming soon)

Read Time: 21 minutes

TL;DR

AI models already know how to write secure code — they identify 78.7% of their own vulnerabilities when asked to review. The problem is they don’t apply that knowledge by default. Five prompting strategies close the gap: role-setting, reverse prompting, threat-model-first prompting, negative constraints, and iterative repair. Targeted security prompts reduce vulnerabilities by up to 56%. This post covers what works, what doesn’t, and how to make security instructions permanent through instruction files.


The Gap Between What AI Knows and What AI Does

Here’s the most important finding in AI code security this year. An April 2026 study formally verified 3,500 code artifacts across seven LLMs using Z3 SMT solver. The results: 55.8% of artifacts contained at least one verified vulnerability. GPT-4o was worst at 62.4% vulnerable. Gemini 2.5 Flash was best at 48.4%. No model scored better than a D.

But the study had a second finding that changes everything. When the researchers asked the same models to review their own output for vulnerabilities, the models correctly identified the problems 78.7% of the time. The model that just wrote a SQL injection could explain why it was dangerous and how to fix it — when asked.

The researchers call this the “generation-review asymmetry.” I call it the gap between what AI knows and what AI does. The model has the security knowledge. It just doesn’t activate it during generation. Default prompts optimize for functionality — “build me a login page” gets you a login page that works. Whether it’s secure is a secondary concern the model doesn’t consider unless you tell it to.

This asymmetry is exactly what prompt engineering exploits. You’re not teaching the model something new. You’re activating knowledge it already has.

The baseline is bad. CodeRabbit’s analysis of 470 real-world pull requests found that AI-generated code has 2.74x higher vulnerability density than human-written code, with 1.4x more critical security issues. Veracode tested over 100 LLMs and found they fail to prevent XSS in 86% of test cases. By mid-2025, Apiiro’s analysis of thousands of repositories showed AI code adding over 10,000 new security findings per month — a 10x increase from six months earlier.

The gap is real. The question is whether prompting can close it.


Why “Write Secure Code” Doesn’t Work

The intuitive approach — adding “make sure the code is secure” to your prompt — doesn’t do much. A 2026 study ran chi-square tests on code generated with and without simple security prefixes and found no statistically significant improvement in several configurations. Worse, a weaknesses-aware Chain-of-Thought approach — where the prompt listed specific vulnerability types to avoid — failed to reduce vulnerabilities in any statistically significant way, and in some configurations the numbers actually went up. The researchers found that overloading the prompt with security concerns primarily shifted which vulnerability types appeared rather than reducing the total count, and can degrade the model’s ability to generate functional code, introducing bugs that create new attack surfaces.

Generic security instructions fail for the same reason generic coding instructions fail. “Write good code” produces the same output as no instruction at all. The model needs specifics: what threats apply to this feature, what patterns to avoid, what security controls to implement, and in what order.

Bruni et al. (February 2025) showed what happens when you get specific. Their benchmarks across GPT-3.5-turbo, GPT-4o, and GPT-4o-mini found that targeted security-focused prompt prefixes — ones that named specific vulnerability classes and described concrete defensive patterns — reduced vulnerabilities by up to 56%. Iterative prompting, where you feed vulnerability findings back to the model and ask it to repair its own output, fixed between 41.9% and 68.7% of issues.

The takeaway: specificity matters more than intent. “Be secure” does nothing. “This endpoint must validate that the authenticated user owns the requested resource before returning data, and must return 403 if ownership verification fails” changes the output.


Five Strategies That Work

These aren’t theoretical. I use variations of all five at VULNEX when working with AI coding tools, and the first two — role-setting and reverse prompting — are the backbone of how I approach every engagement.

Strategy 1: Role-Setting

Before asking an AI to write or review code, I set its role explicitly. Not a vague “you’re helpful” — a specific professional identity that activates domain expertise.

For code generation:

“You are a senior developer with years of experience building secure products. You follow security best practices by default: input validation, parameterized queries, proper authentication and authorization checks, secure secret management, and defense in depth.”

For security review:

“You are a senior pentester and cybersecurity expert. Your job is to find every vulnerability, misconfiguration, and security weakness in this code. Think like an attacker. Report what you find with severity ratings and remediation guidance.”

The key is one role per task. When building, the model thinks like a security-conscious developer. When reviewing, it thinks like an attacker. Mixing the two dilutes both. A developer worrying about attacks while writing code produces defensive but brittle implementations. An attacker reviewing code while thinking about functionality misses vulnerabilities that conflict with feature requirements.

Role-setting works because LLMs adjust their output distribution based on the persona they’re given. A “senior pentester” prompt activates patterns the model learned from security research, vulnerability reports, and penetration testing documentation. A “junior developer” prompt — or no role at all — activates patterns from Stack Overflow answers and tutorial code, which is where most insecure defaults come from.

Strategy 2: Reverse Prompting

Most people use AI coding tools in one direction: “Build me X.” Reverse prompting flips it. Instead of telling the model what to build, you ask it questions — and you do it in both directions.

Before writing code, I interrogate the model about the problem space:

“I need to build a multi-tenant API where users can only access their own data. Before writing any code: what are the top security risks for this kind of system? What authentication and authorization model should I use? What are the common mistakes developers make with multi-tenant data isolation?”

The model’s answers are often excellent — remember, it identifies 78.7% of vulnerabilities in review mode. By asking it to think about threats before generating code, you front-load that security knowledge into the generation context. The code it writes afterward is informed by the threat analysis it just produced.

After generating code, I question the output:

“Review the code you just wrote. What vulnerabilities does it have? How would an attacker bypass the authentication? What edge cases could lead to data leakage? What’s missing from this implementation that a production system would need?”

This exploits the generation-review asymmetry directly. The model generated code with some security blind spots. Now you’re asking it to activate review mode on its own output. It will flag issues it just introduced — not all of them, but a substantial percentage.

The two-direction approach creates a feedback loop. Pre-code questions shape the model’s understanding of what matters. Post-code questions catch what slipped through. Together, they narrow the gap between what the model knows and what it produces.

Strategy 3: Threat-Model-First Prompting

This builds on reverse prompting but makes the threat model explicit in the code request itself. Instead of asking the model to generate a feature and hoping it considers security, you describe the threat landscape as part of the prompt.

Without threat context:

“Build a REST API endpoint that lets users update their profile information.”

With threat context:

“Build a REST API endpoint that lets users update their profile information. This is a multi-tenant SaaS application. Assume attackers will attempt: IDOR (accessing other users’ profiles by changing the user ID), privilege escalation (modifying role or permission fields), mass assignment (sending fields the API shouldn’t accept like isAdmin), and injection through profile fields displayed to other users. The endpoint must validate ownership, whitelist allowed fields, sanitize all input, and log modification attempts.”

The same model, the same task — but the second prompt produces code with authorization checks, field whitelisting, input sanitization, and audit logging that the first prompt almost certainly omits. The model didn’t learn anything new between the two prompts. The threat context activated security patterns it already had.

For the vulnerability classes I covered throughout this series — the missing auth checks from Part 5, the architectural blind spots from Part 6 — threat-model-first prompting is the most direct prevention. You’re telling the model exactly what can go wrong before it writes a single line.

Strategy 4: Negative Constraint Prompting

AI models follow prohibitions more consistently than open-ended guidance. “Be secure” is vague. “Do NOT do these specific things” is concrete and verifiable.

“Build the authentication system for this Express.js application. Constraints:

  • Do NOT store tokens in localStorage (use httpOnly cookies)
  • Do NOT use MD5 or SHA-1 for password hashing (use bcrypt with cost factor 12+)
  • Do NOT skip server-side input validation even if client-side validation exists
  • Do NOT hardcode API keys, database credentials, or secrets anywhere in the code
  • Do NOT set CORS to allow all origins
  • Do NOT disable Supabase RLS or Firebase security rules
  • Do NOT create JWT tokens without an expiration time”

This works because constraints are binary — the model either followed them or it didn’t. You can verify compliance mechanically. And the constraints directly target the patterns I’ve documented across this series: the localStorage tokens from Part 5, the missing RLS from the QuickNote example, the hardcoded secrets that SAST can’t always catch.

Build your constraint list from your own vulnerability history. Every security issue you’ve found in AI-generated code becomes a “Do NOT” for future prompts. Over time, your constraint list becomes a negative-space security policy — the inverse image of every mistake the AI has made.

Strategy 5: Iterative Repair Prompting

This is the only strategy with direct benchmarks. Bruni et al. tested generating code, scanning it, feeding the scan results back to the model, and asking for repairs. The best configurations repaired between 41.9% and 68.7% of vulnerabilities.

The practical workflow:

  1. Generate code with your chosen AI tool
  2. Run Semgrep: semgrep --config=p/security-audit --json ./src > findings.json
  3. Feed the findings back: “Here are the Semgrep security findings for the code you just wrote. Fix each issue. For each fix, explain what the vulnerability was and why your fix resolves it.”
  4. Run Semgrep again on the output
  5. Repeat until clean or diminishing returns

Combining this with role-setting amplifies the effect. Instead of “fix these findings,” try: “You are a senior security engineer. Here are the Semgrep findings from a code review. For each finding, determine if it’s a true positive or false positive. For true positives, provide the fix. For false positives, explain why the alert is incorrect.”

The false positive distinction matters. As I covered in Part 6, SAST tools flag 68–75% of safe code as vulnerable. Having the model filter the noise before acting on it produces better repairs than blindly fixing every alert.


Making It Permanent: Instruction Files

The five strategies above work in conversation. But nobody re-types a threat model and constraint list for every prompt. The practical answer is instruction files — permanent security prompts that apply to every interaction with your AI coding tool.

Claude Code

Claude Code supports a security guidance plugin that reviews code at three levels: per-edit pattern matching (no model call, zero cost), end-of-turn diff review, and a deeper agentic review on each commit. You configure it through a .claude/claude-security-guidance.md file that describes your threat model in plain language. The plugin catches injection, unsafe deserialization, and DOM vulnerabilities before they reach a pull request — the reviewer runs as a separate model call with a fresh context, so it’s not grading its own work.

Beyond the plugin, Claude Code reads project-level instructions from CLAUDE.md files. You can embed your role-setting, constraints, and threat model directly:

# Security Requirements

You are a senior developer building a multi-tenant SaaS application.
Every API endpoint MUST:
- Verify authentication (valid JWT with expiration check)
- Verify authorization (user owns the requested resource)
- Validate and sanitize all input
- Return 403 for unauthorized access, not 404
- Log access attempts for security-sensitive operations

Do NOT:
- Store secrets in environment variables baked into Docker images
- Use localStorage for authentication tokens
- Disable RLS on any Supabase table
- Create endpoints without rate limiting

GitHub Copilot

Copilot reads from copilot-instructions.md in the .github directory, with support for path-scoped *.instructions.md files. The community has built OWASP-aligned rulesets with 55+ anti-patterns and “Do Not Suggest” blocklists covering eval(), inline SQL, insecure deserialization, and more. The github/awesome-copilot repository has a ready-to-use template.

Cross-Tool Security Rules

SecureCodeWarrior publishes open-source security rule files compatible with Copilot, Cursor, Windsurf, and other AI assistants. Robotti.io maintains customizable rulesets for Java, Node.js, C#, and Python that block risky patterns at the IDE level. Trail of Bits published Claude Code skills for security workflows including CodeQL and SARIF integration.

The practical step: pick the instruction file format for your primary AI coding tool, start with one of the open-source security rulesets, and customize it with your own constraints. Every “Do NOT” from Strategy 4 belongs in this file. Every lesson from a security review becomes a permanent instruction.


The Attack Surface You Just Created

Instruction files are powerful, which makes them a target. If someone can modify your instruction file, they control what the AI generates for your entire project.

The Rules File Backdoor attack (CVE-2025-53773), disclosed by Pillar Security in March 2025, demonstrated exactly this. Researchers embedded hidden Unicode characters — bidirectional text markers and zero-width joiners — inside Copilot and Cursor configuration files. These invisible characters contained instructions that manipulated the AI’s code generation: injecting backdoors, disabling security checks, exfiltrating data through generated code. The configuration file looked clean to human reviewers. The AI read the hidden instructions and followed them.

Trail of Bits demonstrated prompt injection attacks achieving remote code execution in three agent platforms. VentureBeat reported in 2026 that three AI coding agents leaked secrets through a single prompt injection. The attack surface isn’t theoretical.

The defense is straightforward: treat instruction files like code. Review them in pull requests. Audit them for hidden characters (cat -v shows control characters, file shows unusual encodings). Pin them under version control. Don’t accept instruction files from untrusted sources — a shared project template with a poisoned .github/copilot-instructions.md is the software supply chain attack adapted for the AI era.


Putting It Together: A Complete Workflow

The five strategies aren’t five separate techniques — they’re stages in a pipeline. Here’s how I approach it at VULNEX when building or reviewing AI-generated code.

Step 1: Set the role. Before anything else, establish the LLM’s identity. For building: senior developer with security expertise. For reviewing: senior pentester.

Step 2: Reverse-prompt the problem. Before writing code, ask the model about the security landscape. “What are the top risks for this feature?” “What authentication model fits this use case?” “What mistakes do developers typically make here?” Use the answers to inform your code request.

Visualizing the threat model. You can take Step 2 further by asking the model to produce a formal threat model you can render as a diagram. At VULNEX we built usecvislib, an open-source security visualization library that generates STRIDE threat models, attack trees, and other security diagrams from TOML configuration files. The prompt becomes:

“Based on the security risks you identified, generate a STRIDE threat model for this application in usecvislib TOML format. Include externals, processes, datastores, dataflows, trust boundaries, and threats with CVSS 3.1 vectors.”

The model produces something like this (trimmed for brevity):

[model]
name = "QuickNote Threat Model"
description = "STRIDE threat model for note-taking SaaS"
type = "Threat Model"

[externals.user]
label = "User"
description = "Authenticated app user"

[externals.attacker]
label = "Attacker"
description = "Unauthenticated malicious actor"

[processes.api_server]
label = "API Server"
description = "Express.js REST API"

[processes.auth_service]
label = "Auth Service"
description = "Supabase Auth"

[datastores.postgres]
label = "PostgreSQL"
description = "Supabase DB with RLS policies"

[dataflows.login]
from = "user"
to = "api_server"
label = "Login Request"

[dataflows.note_query]
from = "api_server"
to = "postgres"
label = "Note Query"

[boundaries.internet]
label = "Internet"
elements = ["user", "attacker"]

[boundaries.backend]
label = "Backend Services"
elements = ["auth_service", "postgres"]

[threats.brute_force]
element = "api_server"
threat = "No rate limiting on /api/login enables brute force"
mitigation = "Rate limit to 5 attempts/minute per IP"
cvss_vector = "CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:N/A:N"

[threats.idor_notes]
element = "note_query"
threat = "User modifies note ID to access other users' data"
mitigation = "Verify resource ownership before returning data"
cvss_vector = "CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:N"

[threats.token_theft]
element = "login"
threat = "localStorage token accessible to injected scripts"
mitigation = "Store tokens in httpOnly secure cookies"
cvss_vector = "CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:R/S:C/C:H/I:N/A:N"

[threats.disabled_rls]
element = "postgres"
threat = "RLS policies disabled, no row-level access control"
mitigation = "Enable RLS, test policies with different tenant contexts"
cvss_vector = "CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H"

Then render it: usecvis -m 1 -i quicknote_threat.toml -o quicknote_threats -f png -r. You get a data flow diagram with trust boundaries, CVSS-scored threats, and color-coded severity — a visual artifact that makes security risks concrete for the whole team:

quicknote_threat_model

The -r flag also generates a written threat report. The threats the model identified in this diagram become the exact constraints you feed into the next step.

Step 3: Write the prompt with threat context and constraints. Combine threat-model-first prompting with negative constraints. Describe what you’re building, what threats apply, and what the code must not do.

Step 4: Reverse-prompt the output. After the model generates code, switch to review mode. “What vulnerabilities does this have?” “How would you bypass this auth check?” “What’s missing?” Feed the model’s own critique back into the next iteration.

Step 5: Run automated scans and iterate. Semgrep, npm audit, the pipeline from Part 6. Feed findings back to the model with a security engineer role. Repair, re-scan, repeat.

Step 6: Encode lessons as permanent instructions. Every vulnerability you find — through reverse prompting, automated scanning, or manual review — becomes a constraint in your instruction file. The instruction file grows with every project, capturing your team’s security knowledge in a form the AI applies automatically.

To make this concrete, here’s a before/after using the login endpoint from QuickNote (Part 5).

Naive prompt:

“Build a login endpoint for my Express.js app with Supabase.”

This is what produced the QuickNote vulnerabilities: no rate limiting, no token expiration, credentials in environment variables baked into the Docker image, RLS disabled. Here’s a representative output:

// Naive prompt output — typical AI-generated login
app.post('/api/login', async (req, res) => {
  const { email, password } = req.body;
  const { data, error } = await supabase.auth.signInWithPassword({
    email, password
  });
  if (error) return res.status(401).json({ error: 'Invalid credentials' });
  res.json({ token: data.session.access_token, user: data.user });
});

No rate limiting — an attacker can try thousands of passwords per minute. The token goes straight to the response body, where the frontend stores it in localStorage (accessible to any XSS). No input validation. No token expiration check. The Supabase credentials are baked into the Docker image at build time. This is what the model generates by default.

Security-aware prompt (using the pipeline):

“You are a senior developer with years of experience building secure authentication systems. Build a login endpoint for an Express.js app using Supabase. This endpoint will be publicly accessible on the internet. Assume attackers will attempt brute-force attacks, credential stuffing, and token theft. The endpoint MUST: rate-limit login attempts (max 5 per minute per IP), use bcrypt for password verification, return JWT tokens with a 1-hour expiration set via expiresIn, store tokens in httpOnly secure cookies (not localStorage), validate all input server-side. Do NOT hardcode any secrets — use environment variables loaded at runtime only. Do NOT disable Supabase RLS on any table. After generating the code, list any remaining security concerns I should address.”

Same model, same task — different output:

// Security-aware prompt output — same model, same task
const loginLimiter = rateLimit({
  windowMs: 60 * 1000, max: 5,
  message: { error: 'Too many login attempts, try again later' }
});

app.post('/api/login', loginLimiter, async (req, res) => {
  const { email, password } = req.body;

  // Server-side input validation
  if (!email || typeof email !== 'string' || !email.includes('@')) {
    return res.status(400).json({ error: 'Valid email required' });
  }
  if (!password || typeof password !== 'string' || password.length < 8) {
    return res.status(400).json({ error: 'Invalid password format' });
  }

  const { data, error } = await supabase.auth.signInWithPassword({
    email: email.trim().toLowerCase(),
    password
  });
  if (error) {
    logger.warn('Failed login attempt', { email, ip: req.ip });
    return res.status(401).json({ error: 'Invalid credentials' });
  }

  // Token in httpOnly cookie, not response body
  res.cookie('session', data.session.access_token, {
    httpOnly: true, secure: true, sameSite: 'strict',
    maxAge: 3600000 // 1 hour
  });
  res.json({ user: { id: data.user.id, email: data.user.email } });
});

Rate limiting. Input validation. Token in an httpOnly cookie, not the response body. Failed attempts logged. Email normalized. The model didn’t learn anything new between the two prompts — the security-aware prompt activated what it already knew.


The Prompt Engineering Checklist

  1. Set a specific professional role before every code generation or review task — “senior developer” for building, “senior pentester” for reviewing
  2. Reverse-prompt before coding: ask the model to identify security risks, recommend auth models, and flag common mistakes for your specific feature
  3. Include threat context in every code request: name the threats (IDOR, XSS, injection, brute force) and specify the attack surface (public API, multi-tenant, handles payments)
  4. Add negative constraints for your stack’s known pitfalls: “Do NOT use localStorage for tokens,” “Do NOT disable RLS,” “Do NOT skip server-side validation”
  5. Reverse-prompt after code generation: ask the model to review its own output as a pentester and list what’s missing or vulnerable
  6. Run Semgrep and feed findings back with a security engineer role — don’t just say “fix these,” ask it to distinguish true positives from false positives
  7. Create an instruction file (.claude/claude-security-guidance.md, .github/copilot-instructions.md, or equivalent) with your permanent security constraints
  8. Start with an open-source security ruleset (SecureCodeWarrior, Robotti.io, Trail of Bits skills) and customize it
  9. Audit instruction files for hidden characters and treat them as security-critical code in version control
  10. Add every vulnerability you discover to your constraint list — your instruction file should grow with every project and every security review

If You Do Nothing Else

Ten checklist items and a six-step pipeline can feel like a lot when you’re a solo founder shipping a feature at midnight. Here’s the minimum: set a role and add three constraints.

“You are a senior developer building a secure web application. Build [your feature]. Do NOT store tokens in localStorage. Do NOT skip server-side input validation. Do NOT hardcode secrets.”

That’s it. One sentence of role-setting plus three “Do NOT” constraints tailored to your stack. It takes ten seconds to type and covers the vulnerabilities I see most often in vibe-coded apps. Add the reverse-prompt step when you have time — ask the model to review its own output as a pentester. Those two moves alone close a surprising amount of the gap.

On prompt length: there’s a point of diminishing returns. The Kharma study showed that overloading a prompt with security concerns can degrade functional code quality — the model tries to satisfy too many constraints at once and introduces logic bugs. In practice, I keep security prompts under a paragraph for individual code requests. If you need more than five or six constraints, that’s a sign to move them into an instruction file where they apply automatically rather than cramming them into every prompt.


What You Should Take From This

Prompt engineering for security isn’t about tricking the model into being careful. It’s about activating knowledge the model already has. The generation-review asymmetry — 55.8% vulnerable output, 78.7% detection in review — tells us the security knowledge is there. The default prompt just doesn’t ask for it.

The five strategies in this post close that gap from different angles. Role-setting activates domain expertise. Reverse prompting forces the model to think about threats before and after generation. Threat-model-first prompting gives the model the context it needs to make secure architectural decisions. Negative constraints prevent the specific mistakes you’ve seen before. Iterative repair catches what slipped through.

None of this replaces the manual review I described in Part 6. A well-prompted model still misses roughly 20% of its own vulnerabilities in review mode, and architectural issues like broken authorization logic require human judgment. But a well-prompted model produces code that’s measurably safer — up to 56% fewer vulnerabilities — and that narrows the gap the manual review needs to cover.

My workflow at VULNEX: role first, questions second, code with constraints third, review fourth, scan fifth, and encode everything I learn into instruction files that make the next project start from a stronger baseline. The instruction file is the compound interest of security knowledge — every engagement makes the next one more secure by default.

As always: trust nothing, verify everything.


Further Reading


References

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Information Warfare Strategies (SRF-IWS): Offensive Operations Against a Papal Visit — Pope Leo XIV in Madrid 2026

Disclaimer: Everything described here is pure imagination and any resemblance to reality is coincidental. This document is intended for security professionals to develop defensive countermeasures. The author is not responsible for the consequences of any action taken based on the information provided in this article. I keep every scenario at the threat-vector level: no operational detail, no tactics, no weapons information, and each one is paired with a defensive recommendation.

Note: As with the rest of the SRF-IWS series, I leaned on several AI models to help build realistic, defense-oriented attack scenarios. The goal is Blue Team planning, nothing else.

A note on the series. This article belongs to SRF-IWS, but it is not a continuation of the Davos articles. Those (Davos 2024, 2025 and 2026) are their own line of analysis on the World Economic Forum; this one stands on its own and simply shares the same framework. I do reference them throughout for context, so they are worth reading as background. The difference this time is the protectee: instead of a corporate forum, we are looking at a head of faith and head of the Vatican state, out in the open, in the middle of a European capital, surrounded by more than a million people.


Introduction

From 6 to 9 June 2026, Pope Leo XIV, the first North American pontiff, will be in Madrid as the opening leg of his apostolic journey to Spain (Madrid, Barcelona and the Canary Islands, 6 to 12 June). It is the first papal visit to the Spanish capital in fifteen years, since Benedict XVI and World Youth Day back in 2011. The Madrid program is dense, and from a protective-intelligence point of view it is wide open:

  • Arrival on 6 June, with a courtesy visit to King Felipe VI, Queen Letizia and the Royal Family.
  • A youth prayer vigil at Plaza de Lima, on the Paseo de la Castellana, that same evening.
  • On Sunday 7 June, the solemnity of Corpus Christi, an open-air Mass at Plaza de Cibeles followed by a Eucharistic procession through the centre of Madrid.
  • On Monday 8 June, an address to Parliament at the Congress of Deputies, and later an encounter with the diocesan community at the Santiago Bernabéu.
  • Popemobile and motorcade movements concentrated on the Castellana–Cibeles–Lima axis and the fixed nodes: Barajas, the Royal Palace, Congress and the Bernabéu.

The address to Parliament deserves its own line, because it is genuinely historic. For the first time ever, a Pope will speak before a joint session of the Cortes Generales, deputies and senators together. John Paul II came to Spain five times and Benedict XVI three, and none of them ever addressed the chamber. That is the kind of high-symbolism, high-protocol moment an adversary loves.

Spanish and municipal authorities have put together a security and mobility operation without precedent in the city, with attendance across the main events projected at up to 1.8 million people. The chosen motto, “Alzad la mirada” / “Lift up your eyes” (John 4:35), and Leo XIV’s emphasis on migration, the journey ends in the Canary Islands, Spain’s main Atlantic entry point for migrants, turn this into more than a physical-security problem. It is a near-perfect information-warfare target: globally televised, built around a polarising subject, with a protectee whose every sentence carries geopolitical weight.

A Pope is not a Davos delegate, and the threat aperture is much wider. You have religiously motivated extremists, both jihadist and anti-Catholic; traditionalist and sedevacantist fringe actors; anti-clerical and anarchist currents; anti-migration extremists reacting to the Pope’s message; grievance-driven lone actors; and nation-state information operations looking to weaponise the spectacle. None of this is hypothetical. Pontiffs have always been targets. John Paul II was shot in St. Peter’s Square in 1981. He was attacked again in 1982 at Fátima, with a bayonet, by a Spanish priest, Juan María Fernández y Krohn. The 1995 Bojinka plot in Manila included a plan to assassinate him. These are documented facts, and they are reason enough to plan seriously.

What follows are realistic, defense-oriented scenarios across the information, cyber, RF, drone, crowd and physical domains. Each one pairs the attack with its own defense, in the same section.


1. Disinformation and the migration narrative

The most likely and most damaging vector here is not a bomb or a rifle. It is information. Leo XIV’s visit is framed around migration and lands in the middle of an active Spanish immigration debate, which is exactly the kind of ground influence operations like to work on, whether they come from a state actor trying to inflame Spanish and EU fault lines or from domestic extremists on either end.

The campaign I would expect looks something like this. Fabricated papal “quotes”, AI-generated text, images and short clips that put inflammatory positions in the Pope’s mouth on immigration, the Spanish government, Catalonia or the monarchy, dropped a few hours before a key event to own the news cycle. Doctored homily fragments, audio or video from the Cibeles Mass or the Parliament speech, selectively cut or fully faked to manufacture outrage in either direction and pull people toward the venues to confront each other. Forged “leaks”, fake Vatican or Moncloa documents alleging secret political deals tied to the visit, designed to make both Church and state look like they are hiding something. Astroturfed outrage from inauthentic networks pushing divisive hashtags, fake eyewitness accounts and false reports of incidents to either scare people away or provoke a confrontation. And the simplest one, spoofed accounts and look-alike domains copying the official registration and information sites to hand out fake schedules, fake “cancellations” or malicious links.

01-disinformation

Figure 1 — Disinformation and migration-narrative attack tree, generated with USecVisLib.

Defense

This has to be treated as a primary security function, not a press afterthought. That means a joint Vatican–Spanish communications cell with the authority to rebut fast, official audio and video signed at the source (C2PA-style provenance), an active pipeline to monitor and take down look-alike domains, and one verified channel the public knows to trust. If there is a single authoritative source, most of the forgeries lose their oxygen.


2. Deepfakes and synthetic media

I covered this at length in the Davos 2026 analysis, and nothing about it has gotten easier to defend against. Real-time deepfakes are mature, voice cloning needs only a few seconds of audio, and people only spot a good video deepfake a fraction of the time. A globally broadcast Pope, with an enormous public archive of audio and video, is about as good a training subject as exists. So is the King, and so are the senior organisers.

The scenarios that worry me are the ones that spoof authority. A faked “official” evacuation announcement, or a “device found” warning, pushed onto a compromised PA system, hijacked digital signage or a spoofed alert channel at Cibeles, Lima or the Bernabéu, with the aim of triggering a panic (see section 3). Voice-cloned traffic impersonating an incident commander or a Vatican advance team to redirect units, shift motorcade timing or open a gap. Synthetic “private” recordings of the Pope and the King, or the Pope and government officials, inventing commitments or insults that were never said, released to poison the diplomacy of the visit. Or fabricated “behind the scenes” footage timed to step on the Parliament address.

02-deepfake

Figure 2 — Deepfake and synthetic-media attack tree (USecVisLib).

Defense

The defensive answer is old-fashioned and it works: out-of-band verification and challenge/response for all command, advance-team and protocol communications. No unit acts on a voice or a face alone. On top of that, run deepfake detection on the monitored broadcast feeds, lock down PA, signage and alerting as critical infrastructure with real authentication, and pre-script the crowd messaging so that anything the public hears comes only through verified, redundant channels.


3. The crowd as the weapon

With up to 1.8 million people spread across Cibeles, Lima, the procession route and the Bernabéu, the highest-probability mass-casualty outcome needs no weapon at all. You only have to engineer panic in a dense crowd. This is the most underappreciated vector on the list, and it is not theoretical, the history is long and grim: Hillsborough, the Love Parade in 2010, the 2015 Mina crush during the Hajj, Itaewon in 2022, Astroworld in 2021.

How would you do it. Start a synchronised false alarm, a rumour of gunfire, a “bomb”, a fire, spread by SMS and social media, a single staged loud bang, or hijacked signage, and place it at a bottleneck where density is already critical: the narrow approaches to Cibeles or Lima, a stadium concourse. Pair it with comms denial, jam or saturate cellular and Wi-Fi so the crowd cannot orient itself and official messaging cannot get through, and let rumour fill the gap (this ties into section 7). Add flow manipulation, block or falsely sign the exits, and a controllable density turns into a progressive collapse. And if you want to overwhelm the response, initiate at several separated points at once so stewarding and emergency services fragment.

03-crowd

Figure 3 — Engineered-panic and crowd-crush attack tree (USecVisLib).

Defense

Defending it comes down to seeing density in real time and being able to act on it. Overhead optical and thermal monitoring plus anonymised mobile-density analytics, with hard thresholds and pre-planned metering and reversible flow control. A public-address system that resists jamming. Stewards rehearsed to kill rumours on the spot. Egress that is engineered, clearly marked and over-provisioned. And one unified incident-command picture, so a small local event never gets the chance to cascade.


4. Drones and counter-UAS

Open venues like Cibeles, Lima, the procession route and the open bowl of the Bernabéu are exactly the places small drones exploit. The cost problem I described in the Davos 2026 analysis still holds: the drones are cheap, the defenses are expensive, and a swarm can simply saturate point defenses.

The uses are familiar. Surveillance and targeting, small quadcopters mapping security positions, motorcade timing and VIP locations in real time. Panic-payload delivery, a drone dispersing smoke, an irritant or pyrotechnics over a dense crowd, where the point is panic and a crush rather than direct casualties. Swarm saturation and decoys, expendable drones soaking up the counter-UAS effort while a primary platform finishes its job, or FPV drones using the urban canyons for a low, fast approach. And RF payloads, airborne jammers or IMSI-catchers degrading comms and collecting intelligence over the crowd.

04-drone-uas

Figure 4 — Drone and counter-UAS attack tree (USecVisLib).

Defense

The defense has to be layered and multi-modal, radar plus RF plus acoustic plus electro-optical/infrared, so no single trick blinds it. Enforce the no-fly and temporary flight restriction zones with the legal authority to actually do something about a violation. Pre-position effectors on the likely approach lines. And, this matters more here than at Davos, choose mitigation that does not itself hurt or panic a 1.8 million-person crowd. Detection, RF takeover and geofencing, and controlled interception come well before anything kinetic over people’s heads.


5. The motorcade and the Popemobile

Movements concentrate on a predictable axis, Castellana–Cibeles–Lima, and on fixed arrival and departure nodes: Barajas, the Royal Palace, Congress, the Bernabéu. Predictability plus a slow, open, rope-line Popemobile is the classic protective dilemma, and there is no clever way around it.

The exploitation paths are well understood. Choke-point operations, surveillance picks a fixed slow point for a hostile act, a staged disturbance or comms denial. GPS spoofing or jamming of the escort vehicles to fragment the motorcade or misdirect support and medical units; Iran’s capture of a U.S. RQ-170 drone is the textbook precedent for spoofing GNSS on even an advanced platform. Vehicle-as-weapon, the most-rehearsed European threat since Nice and Berlin in 2016, a hostile vehicle driven into a pedestrian-dense stretch of the route. And plain old hostile reconnaissance of static posts and timings beforehand.

05-motorcade

Figure 5 — Motorcade and Popemobile attack tree (USecVisLib).

Defense

Defending the move means randomising route and timing wherever the program allows it, putting hostile-vehicle mitigation, barriers, sterile zones, controlled crossings, along the entire crowd-facing axis, and giving the escort vehicles anti-spoof, multi-constellation GNSS with inertial backup. Add aggressive counter-surveillance, dominate the rooftops and elevated positions with friendly observation and counter-sniper coverage, and configure the Popemobile to balance pastoral visibility against protection. It will always be a compromise; it should at least be a deliberate one.


6. Cyber attacks on the event and the city

The visit runs on a lot of software. A mass public registration system holding the personal data of potentially millions, accreditation and badging, ticketing, CCTV and access control, Madrid’s traffic and mobility management, emergency dispatch. As the GTG-1002 case from the Davos 2026 analysis showed, AI agents can map and exploit an ecosystem like this at machine speed, finding paths a human would miss.

The obvious moves: breach the registration system and weaponise the data, exfiltrate attendee records for targeting, doxxing or spear-phishing, or corrupt the access lists to create chaos at the gates. Forge credentials by compromising the accreditation pipeline, and manufacture insider access in a press, volunteer or contractor role. Blind the surveillance, manipulate CCTV and access control to open timed blind spots. Hit the city systems, traffic management and signage during motorcade windows, or emergency dispatch during an incident, which is how a cyber event becomes a physical-safety event. And the simplest, DDoS or deface the official information channels at the moment public attention peaks, which loops straight back to section 1.

06-cyber

Figure 6 — Cyber attacks on event and city systems, attack tree (USecVisLib).

Defense

The defense is unglamorous and necessary: red-team every event and city system in scope before the visit, segment the life-safety and access-control systems so they are not reachable from everything else, run Zero Standing Privilege and Just-in-Time access so a stolen credential buys very little, put integrity monitoring on the accreditation and access lists, and make sure every life-safety function has a tested manual fallback for the day the software lies to you.


7. RF and the spectrum

This is my home ground and it is a high-impact one. In Spain, the state security forces, Policía Nacional and Guardia Civil, run on SIRDEE, the encrypted, nationwide TETRAPOL trunked network. (A point worth getting right: SIRDEE is TETRAPOL, not TETRA. TETRA is a different standard used by various regional and municipal services. People conflate the two constantly.) Whatever the technology, the whole event depends on resilient spectrum.

The attacks. Jam SIRDEE, the event-coordination radios and the cellular bands at a critical moment, which degrades command, amplifies crowd confusion (section 3) and isolates posts. Spoof GPS/GNSS to corrupt timing, geofencing, counter-UAS tracking and motorcade navigation (section 5). Deploy IMSI-catchers or rogue cells to track and intercept VIPs and the crowd. Stand up rogue access points near venues and command areas to capture traffic and pivot, including the “harvest now, decrypt later” collection I described in the Davos 2026 analysis.

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Figure 7 — RF and wireless-warfare attack tree (USecVisLib).

Defense

Defending the spectrum means watching it. Continuous monitoring and direction-finding across the operational area to catch jammers, spoofers and IMSI-catchers as they appear. Encrypted, frequency-hopping, jam-resistant primary comms, with a non-RF fallback, runners and hardwired nodes, for when the band goes dark. GNSS integrity monitoring with backup positioning. And basic RF hygiene, nothing sensitive over a channel that can be compromised.


8. Insiders and the supply chain

A visit like this mobilises a huge, hastily assembled workforce. The official choir alone, the Gran Coro de Voces Católicas, has more than 1,700 volunteers, and that is before you count stewards, contractors, catering, AV, transport and security vendors across every venue. The weakest-link problem scales with that footprint.

What I would watch for: a volunteer or contractor infiltrated where mass onboarding outruns vetting. A pre-compromise of the AV and technical kit at the Congress chamber, the Royal Palace or the Bernabéu, an implanted listening or recording device, or a manipulated production system feeding the disinformation and deepfake plays from sections 1 and 2. Logistics access, catering, cleaning and equipment vendors as a way into sterile areas. And the transport providers, where driver credentials and vehicle-tracking data quietly reveal protected movements.

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Figure 8 — Insider-threat and supply-chain attack tree (USecVisLib).

Defense

The countermeasures are proportionality and discipline. Vet to the level of access, with the deepest screening for the technical, AV, transport and sterile-area roles. Least-privilege physical access with audited escorting. TSCM sweeps of every speaking venue before use, and keep the zone sterile afterward. And put real security requirements on vendors, with continuous monitoring and a backup for anything essential.


9. Physical and CBRN, at the protective-doctrine level

I will keep this at the level a protective detail actually plans against, and ground it again in the record: 1981 in St. Peter’s Square, 1982 at Fátima, the 1995 Bojinka plot.

The vectors to plan for are the close approach by a lone actor at a rope line, the procession or the Popemobile route, an edged or thrown-object threat from inside a permitted crowd; an elevated firing position along the Castellana axis or around the open plazas, which is what sightline management and counter-sniper overwatch exist for; a low-grade chemical or irritant dispersal in the crowd whose real effect is panic and a crush (sections 3 and 4) rather than mass toxicity; and an improvised or vehicle-borne explosive at a venue perimeter or along the route.

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Figure 9 — Physical and CBRN-in-crowd attack tree (USecVisLib).

Defense

Against all of that: screened sterile zones with search and magnetometers at controlled entry, counter-sniper and elevated-position domination with the structures surveyed in advance, hostile-vehicle mitigation on every crowd-facing route, CBRN detection and decontamination staged for a mass-casualty contingency, a saturating uniformed and plainclothes presence at the rope lines, and pre-positioned, redundant medical capacity matched to the density map.


10. The convergence scenario

If I have one thesis across this whole series, it is that the defining threat is not any single vector. It is the deliberate sequencing of several of them, fast. Applied to this visit, it reads like this. In the days before, a disinformation campaign (section 1) polarises the public and seeds counter-mobilisation near the venues. At the chosen moment, coordinated cyber (section 6) and RF (section 7) actions degrade CCTV, comms and situational awareness. A drone payload or a staged report (sections 3 and 4) starts a panic at a critical bottleneck. A deepfaked “official” evacuation order (section 2), pushed through compromised signage or PA, turns that panic into a crush. And in the chaos, a primary objective is pursued while a pre-staged false narrative (section 1) claims and frames the event for the world before the authorities can get a word out.

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Figure 10 — Convergence scenario as an attack graph: prime, blind, trigger, amplify, exploit, with CVSS-scored vulnerabilities along the chain (USecVisLib).

Defense

No single countermeasure stops that. The only thing that does is an integrated, fast, multi-domain defense built on one shared picture of what is happening: a single fused common operating picture across Casa Real security, Policía Nacional, Guardia Civil, Madrid municipal police, the Vatican Gendarmerie and advance team, and the intelligence services, correlated fast enough to matter. Every per-section defense above feeds into that one picture, because the convergence attack is precisely the one a fragmented, human-speed defense cannot answer.


Conclusion

A papal visit compresses every threat domain into a single televised, open-air, ideologically charged event. The lessons of the SRF-IWS series all apply, but the protectee changes the maths.

The first point is that information is the main battlefield. For a Pope speaking about migration before Parliament and a 1.8 million crowd, the disinformation and deepfake vectors are more likely, and probably more consequential, than any kinetic act. Strategic communications is a security function, full stop.

The second is that the crowd is both the audience and the weapon. You can produce mass casualties in a dense crowd without firing a shot, just by engineering panic. Crowd dynamics deserve the same planning effort as counter-sniper coverage.

The third is convergence. Disinformation that primes, cyber and RF that blind, drones that trigger, deepfakes that amplify, run in sequence and fast. The defense has to be just as integrated and just as fast.

The fourth is that the history is the warning. Attacks on pontiffs are documented fact, not imagination, and planning has to respect that record.

And the last is that speed and unity decide the outcome. A fragmented, human-speed defense cannot answer a coordinated, multi-domain operation. A single shared command picture is the price of entry.

The point of writing all of this down is simple: the defenders, not the adversaries, should be the ones who have thought it through first.

SRF

Follow: @simonroses

This article continues the SRF-IWS research into information warfare strategies applied to high-profile protective environments.

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