Alex Stamos has a new job: chief information security officer at Cognition, the company behind the AI coding agent Devin.
Stamos announced the move Tuesday in a post on X titled "Why I'm joining Cognition." He argued that AI raises real safety and security issues, but ones that can be fixed rather than feared. Cognition is best known for Devin, an AI agent that writes and ships code with limited human oversight. Bringing on a dedicated security chief suggests the company now treats security as core infrastructure, not an afterthought.
AI coding agents that can read, write, and deploy code on their own are a genuinely new kind of attack surface, not just a faster way to ship features. Hiring a security executive signals Cognition wants to get ahead of that risk before an incident forces the issue, and it frames security as something the product is built on rather than patched onto later.
Plenty of AI companies only talk about safety after something goes wrong. Whether Cognition means it before, not after, is the thing worth watching next.