Okta CEO ‘paranoid’ as vibe coders stir SaaS-pocalypse fears

Okta chairman and CEO Todd McKinnon said he believes it would be difficult for an LLM alone to replicate the quality of SaaS applications his company provides, but that doesn’t stop him from worrying about competition from bots.

“We are paranoid. And we're making sure that we are using all the latest technologies: LLMs, coding tools to make sure we have not only something that's resilient and secure but has the best features and the best capabilities,” he told investors during a fourth quarter earnings call on Wednesday. “And so we're making sure that we build things internally as fast as anyone could build them because we – make no mistakes, the prize here that the whole industry is going after, which is this agentic future where digital labor is part of the TAM is a massive prize.”

McKinnon joins many wary investors who are likewise taking ...