Pegasus founder Shalev Hulio urges governments to run their own AI

In short: Shalev Hulio, who previously led the company behind Pegasus spyware, is now pitching tools that let governments run AI on their own systems instead of using US providers.

What happened

Shalev Hulio, the former chief executive and co-founder of Israel’s NSO Group, told the Financial Times that governments should build and host their own AI models. An AI model is the part of an AI system that learns from data and produces answers, like a “brain” trained for a specific job.

Hulio is now behind a company called Dream, which he co-founded in 2022 with Sebastian Kurz, the former chancellor of Austria. Dream sells cyber security products to governments. Cyber security means protecting computer systems and data from attacks.

Dream has three main products. Sphere is marketed as a national cyber defence system. Hero is designed to find and fix weak spots in software automatically. In June, Dream launched Atlas, which it says lets governments build custom AI models and run them on their own infrastructure, rather than using outside cloud providers (renting computing power from someone else’s data centers).

The company has raised more than $400 million and was valued at $3 billion in June, according to the FT. Dream says it has sold cyber security tools to more than a dozen countries, and that Atlas has been deployed in two countries.

Why it matters

More governments are worried about where sensitive information ends up, and what happens if a foreign company changes the rules or cuts off access. Hulio argues that AI is becoming like critical infrastructure, similar to electricity or water, so countries will want more direct control. At the same time, his past role at NSO Group and the use of Pegasus to hack phones has drawn heavy criticism, which may affect how much trust governments and the public place in his new push.

Source: Financial Times