第四波浪潮：當人工智慧編寫程式碼——並對其進行破解

We’ve crossed a meaningful inflection point in the evolution to the Fourth Wave and the future of software development and delivery. The Fourth Wave isn’t just about faster engineering — it’s about AI becoming an active participant across the entire software lifecycle. Coding copilots have moved from experimentation to standard practice in less than two years, and the impact is already measurable: ~90% of Fortune 100 companies are using AI coding tools, ~40–50% of code is now AI-generated in many environments, and developer adoption is approaching universal across enterprise teams.

At the same time, enterprise organizations are waking up to an uncomfortable reality: faster code generation doesn’t automatically mean faster value delivery in the complex, end-to-end business process of software development. Coding agents are just one piece of that process — and in most large organizations, the real friction lives upstream in planning and downstream in testing, security, and release, not in the coding task itself.

But the bigger story here isn’t about the bottlenecks we’ve already identified. There’s a parallel shift happening — one that is less discussed and far more consequential.

AI Is Now a First-Class Threat Actor

The same capabilities accelerating development are now accelerating attacks.

Recent developments like Anthropic’s Mythos model and related Project Glasswing consortium highlight just how far this has progressed. These systems are capable of identifying previously unknown vulnerabilities and generating exploits with minimal human input. They can reverse engineer applications in seconds and agents can be harnessed by threat actors to create an army of attacks.
We are no longer dealing with incremental improvements in security tooling or attacker sophistication. We are entering a world where AI can discover and weaponize vulnerabilities faster than most organizations can respond. The accelerated risk is not just about speed, it’s also about: complexity, scale, sophistication and breadth. When the creators of these models have signaled concern about the implications of broad release, we know this is the moment where the industry needs to recalibrate.

The Attack Surface Is Expanding — From Both Sides

What makes this moment different is that risk is increasing simultaneously from two directions.

從外部來看， AI is transforming the attacker ecosystem:

• Attack timelines are compressing from hours to seconds
• Agents and Agent Swarms are unlocking unprecedented scale and complexity of attacks
• The number of active, smaller hacking groups is growing as barriers to entry fall and costs plummet
• AI is enabling automated reconnaissance, exploit generation, and adaptive attacks

在內部， AI is changing how code is produced:

• Developers are generating significantly more code, faster than ever
• AI-generated code can introduce vulnerabilities that are not always fully understood
• Many uses of coding copilot are creating more “black box” situations where the developers themselves do not understand the code
• Insecure patterns can now propagate at scale across systems with often immature and manual DevOps processes making matters even worse

We are already seeing the data reflect this shift. 根據 Digital.ai的2025 Application Security 威脅報告：

• 83% of applications are under constant attack — a nearly 20% increase from the prior year
• Attack rates surged across every major industry: telecom (91%), financial services (87.5%), automotive (86%), and healthcare (78.5%)
• The gap between iOS and Android attack rates has narrowed significantly as jailbreaking techniques and AI-assisted exploitation have matured
• Freely available AI tools have made it easier than ever for threat actors to reverse engineer, analyze, and exploit applications at scale

The net effect is a new kind of asymmetry. The window between vulnerability creation and exploitation is collapsing. Our 2026 data, coming soon, will show how much further that line has moved.

Why the Old Security Model Breaks

Most enterprise security strategies were built for a different era — one defined by human-paced development and human-scale attacks.
 
That model assumes:

• Code is written and reviewed by developers
• Vulnerabilities are discovered over time; patches were issued when possible
• Defenders have a window to detect and respond

None of those assumptions hold in the Fourth Wave.
 
When code is generated instantly and attacks are executed instantly, security cannot be periodic or reactive. It cannot live at the perimeter or rely solely on scanning and patching. It must be embedded into the application itself — continuous, adaptive, and real-time.

The Acceleration of Application Self-Defense

This is why we are seeing a new level of urgency around application-level protection. Capabilities like obfuscation, anti-tampering, runtime application self-protection (RASP), and white-box cryptography have been around for some time, but in the Fourth Wave these approaches have moved from optional additional protections to a requirement to survive in today’s threat landscape. They have now become the foundational components of a modern security strategy. Not because they are new but because the environment has changed.
In a world where AI is continuously probing for weaknesses, decompiling applications in seconds and scaling attacks to unparalleled levels, applications must be able to defend themselves from within, at runtime, without relying on external intervention. This is especially true for mobile and web applications, where the attack surface is highly exposed, the network is outside your control, and you don’t own the operating environment.

The Strategic Implication

The Fourth Wave is defined by a simple but powerful dynamic: AI is accelerating how software is built—and how it is attacked. That duality creates both opportunity and risk at unprecedented scale. The organizations that treat AI purely as a productivity lever will miss the bigger picture. The ones that recognize the need to evolve their security model alongside their development model will be the ones that lead. In this new environment, speed alone is not an advantage. Speed without security is a liability.
 
The winners in the Fourth Wave will build and innovate faster—but more importantly, they will deliver secure applications at machine speed.
 
Smarter software. Agentic speed. Secure by design.