Arvind Krishna & Nikesh Arora: Quantum Threat, Open vs Frontier AI, AI Cyber Warfare & SaaS Collapse

The two CEOs at the center of the enterprise AI and cybersecurity conversation — IBM’s Arvind Krishna and Palo Alto Networks’ Nikesh Arora — were pressed on the All-In podcast on a range of topics that usually get treated separately but, in their view, are tightly linked: the coming quantum threat to all current encryption, the economics of open versus frontier AI models, the inevitability of an AI arms race, and the coming collapse of the bloated SaaS stack.

The quantum clock is already ticking

Krishna gave a concrete timeline. DARPA’s Quantum Benchmarking Initiative started with a couple hundred companies; it is now down to about 13. The goal is a working quantum computer, and the credible estimates cluster around 2030. If that happens, today’s cryptography is broken — not a supposition, but a mathematical certainty. Worse, an encrypted hard disk stolen today could be stored for five years and then cracked. The good news, he said, is that post-quantum cryptography already exists as written code. The bad news: “People have been too lazy to get to it.”

Arora added that the timeline is actually tighter than it looks, because you cannot swap out five trillion dollars of IT infrastructure in a year. “If he says it’s 2029, 2030, we’re already late.” He estimates that 50 percent of current enterprise IT spend is on infrastructure that is not quantum-safe.