How Do You Defend Against AI That Can Hack?

a16z's Joel De La Garza is joined by Nick Warner of Neo and Max Pollard of Cotool to discuss what happens when cybersecurity tools built to defend against humans and malware suddenly have to contend with AI agents. As frontier models become more capable of finding and exploiting vulnerabilities, many of the assumptions underlying traditional security are beginning to break.

They explore why guardrails designed to stop AI-powered attackers can also prevent security teams from doing their jobs, why defenders increasingly need access to multiple models, and how agentic software creates an entirely new endpoint security problem. They also discuss why static signatures and even newer techniques like honeypots are struggling in a world where software can reason and act autonomously.

Recorded around Black Hat, the conversation looks at how security teams are adapting in real time and why the same AI capabilities creating new attack surfaces could ultimately give defenders their biggest advantage yet.

Resources:

Follow Nick on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nicholaswarner/

Follow Max on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mmpollard/

Follow Joel De La Garza on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/3448827723723234/

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