Extract from Jerry Bui’s article “The Louvre Heist and the New Crown Jewels: Why Antiquated Security Fails in the Age of AI”
Over the weekend, the unthinkable happened in Paris. In broad daylight, a group of thieves posing as maintenance workers used a construction lift to scale the side of the Louvre, smashed into the Galerie d’Apollon, and escaped with several of France’s crown jewels—emerald and diamond pieces that once belonged to Empress Eugénie and Queen Marie-Amélie.
The entire operation lasted less than seven minutes.
According to reports from Le Monde and Reuters, the heist succeeded not because of genius or brute force, but because the museum’s security infrastructure was antiquated—camera blind spots, outdated alarms, and legacy access controls that hadn’t evolved with modern threats. In essence, the Louvre was protecting 19th-century treasures with 20th-century systems in a 21st-century world.
That, to me, is the perfect metaphor for where many enterprises stand today.
