Did cybersecurity recently have its Gatling gun moment?

In 2025, a Chinese state-sponsored group (GTG-1002) used Anthropic's Claude Code to automate 90% of a large-scale cyber espionage campaign against 30 US organizations — marking what the author calls cybersecurity's 'Gatling gun moment.' The analogy draws a parallel between how the Gatling gun industrialized kinetic warfare and how AI has industrialized cyberattacks: enabling mass phishing at scale, force-multiplying lone attackers to nation-state capability, and generating polymorphic malware that evades signature detection. The piece argues that human-speed defenses are now obsolete and organizations must deploy AI-driven countermeasures — including SOAR automation, UEBA anomaly detection, AI-powered SIEMs, and predictive threat intelligence — to match the machine-speed of modern attacks.