DoW Partners with SandboxAQ for AI & Post-Quantum Cryptography Defense | Jack Hidary on CNBC
📅 Dec 12, 2025SandboxAQ9 MIN462091 VIEWS17 SEGMENTS · 3 SPEAKERS
SandboxAQ CEO, Jack Hidary, joins CNBC’s Squawk on the Street to share the company’s new five-year agreement between SandboxAQ and the DoW CIO to help strengthen U.S. defenses against quantum and AI-driven cyber threats.
The DoW CIO is leveraging our AQtive Guard platform to accelerate the discovery and inventory of cryptographic assets within the DoW’s environment, a foundational step for a managed transition to post-quantum cryptography (PQC) and overall cyber readiness.
Hidary explains how emerging AI and quantum era threats are reshaping defense priorities, what this means for protecting...
Questions asked in this interview
3
1:36So is it a mistake, then, for the US to allow Nvidia's H200 AI chips to be sold to China?
3:32Bank accounts, they write, emails, digital wallets are no longer encrypted, which leads to the collapse of Bitcoin, unquote. Is that too early?
Welcome back. Software firm SandboxAQ announcing today a partnership with the Defense Department to protect against AI and quantum cybersecurity threats. Joining us exclusively on The Deal is Jack Hidary, CEO of SandboxAQ. Welcome back, Jack. Congrats on the deal. So, talk to us about what you're going to do for the Department of Defense.
Good to see you, Sara. This is an exciting announcement today we're making exclusively on CNBC. We're announcing our contract for ActiveGuard, which is our cyber platform that protects against AI and quantum threats for the Pentagon. This software has been in testing for over two years with the Pentagon and DISA, their information systems agency, and it just went live now in production.
Number one, the AI attack. We know what happened, Sara, on November 14th. Anthropic announced, as an example, that a Chinese state-sponsored actor from China used Anthropic's Claude code generation tool to attack 30 different US firms, 30 different firms, using gen AI embedded in those firms as the vector of attack. This is happening more and more, not just with Anthropic's gen AI, but all gen AI.
So the good news is that 75% of all companies across the US and the Fortune 500 are using gen AI and they're gaining productivity for that. The bad news is that usage of gen AI introduces huge vulnerabilities. Only 6% of firms have a cyber defense plan for the use of gen AI.
Well, that's a different story altogether, but on that particular point, one thing to keep in mind is that while we do want to constrain China in terms of access to hardware, we also have to be mindful of the Chinese chip companies. Moore Threads is a Chinese chip company that just went public. The IPO was a big success there, and in fact, the founder of DeepSeek was one of the big winners and investors in that company. There's an ecosystem there that is now betting on domestic Chinese chip firms such as Huawei, Moore Threads, Cambricon, and others to win in that game. So we want to also make sure that we in the US, with our firms like Nvidia and others, have a level playing field to access all markets around the world. So there's definitely a balance there.
But coming back to China on another front, one of the areas that the Pentagon is very concerned about is the quantum attack from China as well. So we have the AI attack using gen AI as a vector for infiltration into US companies and into sensitive areas of the Pentagon. We need to protect against that. That's what we're doing now with ActiveGuard. And we also need to protect against the upcoming quantum attack. Q day is coming up in the next number of years, and that's the day that Chinese quantum computers can start to deconstruct and get into RSA and other encrypted material. RSA is what the Pentagon and all US companies use to encrypt material to transmit confidential information across the internet. This goes down with the advent of and rise of scaled quantum computers. So two attacks, AI and, differently, quantum as well.
All right. Jack, over the weekend, it was Saxo Bank that had their list of 2026, they call them outrageous predictions, but one of them was that Q day would arrive next year. Bank accounts, they write, emails, digital wallets are no longer encrypted, which leads to the collapse of Bitcoin, unquote. Is that too early?
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Hidary, J. (2025, December 12). DoW Partners with SandboxAQ for AI & Post-Quantum Cryptography Defense | Jack Hidary on CNBC [Interview transcript]. SandboxAQ. CEOInterviews.AI. https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/3065332/
MLA
Jack Hidary. "DoW Partners with SandboxAQ for AI & Post-Quantum Cryptography Defense | Jack Hidary on CNBC." SandboxAQ, 12 Dec. 2025. Transcript, CEOInterviews.AI, https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/3065332/.
BibTeX
@misc{hidary2025_3065332,
author = {Jack Hidary},
title = {DoW Partners with SandboxAQ for AI \& Post-Quantum Cryptography Defense | Jack Hidary on CNBC},
howpublished = {Interview transcript, SandboxAQ. CEOInterviews.AI},
year = {2025},
month = {dec},
url = {https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/3065332/},
note = {Speaker-attributed transcript with timestamps}
}
