Although US President Donald Trump has consumed much of the attention at the World Economic Forum's annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland, just down the street other issues are quietly drawing a lot of attention, chief among them, technology vulnerabilities.
Along the promenade near the congress centre, dozens of technology and cybersecurity firms are trying to raise awareness of their offerings and gain insights into the concerns of government leaders.
One of the companies is SandboxAQ, a California firm that works at the junction of quantum technology, cybersecurity and artificial intelligence, providing software as a service (SAAS) solutions to clients all over the world.
In an interview at WEF, SandboxAQ chief executive Jack Hidary told The National that his company's presence in Davos is not about securing contracts, but rather about listening to concerns and building relationships.
Among those concerns, niche though it may initially sound, is the problem faced by the average smartphone consumer and some of the world's biggest shipping and transportation companies: GPS jamming and GPS spoofing.
GPS spoofing is when a device is used to make someone's navigation system on a smartphone, or even on a commercial plane, show an incorrect location.
GPS jamming is similar, but completely renders navigation and mapping service useless for a period of time.
“The threat is getting bigger and bigger,” Mr Hidary said.
In June last year, residents in several countries throughout the Middle East reported significant inaccuracies in the location services used by their smartphones, and more consequentially, so did ships and commercial aeroplanes.
Later in September, media outlets reported that European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen's plane had GPS problems that probably stemmed from Russian interference.
Mr Hidary said some recent reports from pilots indicate that GPS jamming efforts have created a domino effect and caused other problems within planes.
“Recently, there was a plane flying and because it lost GPS because of jamming, the autopilot would not engage,” he said.
“We're not exactly sure how the jamming affected the other problem, but it's a big concern.”
Only last year, Sandbox AQ announced a “commercially available prototype” of the technology it is calling AQNav, which is significantly more resilient to being compromised.
Mr Hidary said it uses the Earth's magnetic field in a very similar way to how birds and other animals navigate.
He said the US Air Force has tested the company's technology, as have several other aviation companies.
Airlines in the Middle East, he added, have shown interest as well.
AI and cybersecurity
At WEF's annual meeting, despite all the conversations taking place, the topic of AI is paramount, and for Mr Hidary and Sandbox AQ, that puts cybersecurity front and centre.
“Yes, there's great potential in AI and it's helping a lot, but large language models are also a vector of cyber attack,” he said, noting Anthropic's recent announcement that a nation-state hacking group was able to infiltrate multiple clients via generative AI.
He also warned that the ease of use and encouraged use of chatbots have created a major, overlooked cybersecurity problem, with some employees placing confidential and proprietary data into AI chatbots to expedite work tasks.
“I'm not talking about closed, licensed AI tools, I'm talking about generic chatbots like ChatGPT and Gemini,” Mr Hidary said, recalling a recent incident involving several Samsung employees.
“Two engineers put a prompt question into ChatGPT with proprietary Samsung information and became part of the data that you can query today,” he said. Similar incidents are happening ever day, he added.
“It opens up a huge amount of cyber and trade secret vulnerabilities and companies are only beginning to realise it,” he said.
Although it is not necessarily leading headlines in Davos, the issue of cybersecurity is among the top 10 concerns, both for the short term and long term, among those surveyed in the WEF's 2026 global risks report.
“Technological risks are also anticipated to worsen in severity over the next decade,” the report warned.
For companies such as Sandbox AQ, the report reaffirms what they are hearing on the ground in Davos. “Cyber security looms large,” Mr Hidary said.
