SandboxAQ CEO Jack Hidary at Davos: GPS Jamming and AI Cyber Threats Now Converge

CEO tells The National that navigation interference and AI vulnerabilities now form a single threat surface for critical systems.

PALO ALTO, Calif., Apr. 28, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- At the World Economic Forum in Davos, Jack Hidary, CEO of SandboxAQ, warned that GPS jamming, GPS spoofing, and AI-enabled cyberattacks are converging into a single operational threat to critical systems. In remarks to The National, Hidary said the threats are no longer separate concerns but overlapping challenges requiring unified resilience.

SandboxAQ addresses both fronts with two technologies: AQNav, which uses the Earth's magnetic field — the same signal birds and animals navigate by — to deliver resilient positioning, navigation, and timing in GPS-denied environments, and AQtive Guard, which unifies AI security and cryptographic posture management.

GPS interference is shifting from edge case to operational norm:

• In June 2025, residents across multiple Middle Eastern countries reported location-service disruptions affecting consumer devices, ships, and aircraft, according to The National.
• In September 2025, media outlets reported GPS jamming on a flight carrying European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, attributed to Russian interference.

"Recently, there was a plane flying and because it lost GPS because of jamming, the autopilot would not engage," Hidary said, citing pilot reports of cascading failures inside aircraft systems. AQNav, tested by the US Air Force and several aviation companies, has drawn interest from Middle Eastern airlines.

Hidary linked GPS disruption to a parallel AI threat: "Large language models are also a vector of cyber attack." He cited nation-state hackers exploiting generative AI tools, plus the Samsung incident, where engineers entered confidential information into ChatGPT.

The WEF's 2026 Global Risks Report ranks cyber insecurity #6 among short-term global risks, with adverse outcomes of AI technologies showing the sharpest long-term rise — moving from #30 in the two-year outlook to #5 in the ten-year outlook. The report warns that "technological risks are also anticipated to worsen in severity over the next decade."

Learn more or request a demo at sandboxaq.com. Read the full Davos coverage in The National.

About SandboxAQ

SandboxAQ is an enterprise company delivering AI solutions at the intersection of machine learning and science. Spun out from Alphabet in 2022, it develops Large Quantitative Models (LQMs) for life sciences, cybersecurity, financial services, navigation, and advanced materials. Visit www.sandboxaq.com to learn more.

SOURCE SandboxAQ