I find it breathlessly funny how people think it's going to be AIs vs AIs fighting it out with light sabers and plasma lasers in the cyber space or some shit.

Your intuition that this can be balanced out is wrong. When you have a CVE in your TCP stack, your vault unlocks and you're fucked, it's done. My dude, there is never going to be AIs scanning every incoming packet for signs of a 0day, and deciding whether to, uhh, cut it up with a lightsaber and shoot it with a laser pistol. Your options are to have a stack so secure that it can't be targeted, or to disconnect all network cables.