The clearest measure of how corporate America re-priced executive risk after December 2024 is sitting in proxy statements. A July analysis by PYMNTS, drawing on filings and Financial Times reporting, catalogs the shift: Intel's disclosed executive-security spending rose more than 8,000% between 2023 and 2024 — from roughly $3,000 to roughly $250,000. Lockheed Martin's rose 798%, with about $1.19 million of chief-executive compensation allocated to security in its 2025 proxy. Meta disclosed $27 million in 2025 protecting its chief executive and family. Alphabet, Amazon, Nvidia, and Palantir all raised executive-protection budgets more than 10% year over year.
Equilar's broader benchmark, published via the Harvard Law School corporate-governance forum, found more than a third of S&P 500 companies now disclose security perquisites, at a median value of $130,468 — up 20% in a year.
The uncomfortable finding sits in the practitioner data. ASIS International research surveying 824 security professionals found only 28% of organizations have a formal executive-protection policy with dedicated resources; 38% fold it into a broader security plan. Much of the new money is buying visible measures — details, drivers, residential hardening — bolted onto programs that still lack the intelligence function that determines where those measures should point.
The board approved the budget. The harder question is whether anyone is watching for the person who has already decided.
Targeted violence is preceded by observable behavior: grievance broadcast online, leakage to third parties, research on the target, probing of routines. A protection program without continuous monitoring of those signals is positioned to respond to an attack, not to preempt one. That monitoring has to run across open sources around the clock, across more than 50 languages, and it has to connect what it finds to the specific executives, facilities, and travel it bears on — which is precisely the work LUCID — OSINT Awareness automates, with analysts adjudicating what surfaces. Detection is automated; the judgment that someone is a genuine threat, and what to do about it, stays human.
Governance
AI assistants operate within APEX, using governed, auditable data. They do not bypass authority, workflows, or oversight.
Boards have done the easy part: the money is there. The programs that convert it into actual safety will be the ones that fund the intelligence layer, not just the visible one.