Insecure Agents is a podcast that curates the most important conversations and trends in AI security. AI engineers, CISOs, and security practitioners listen to learn how to give their agents the security they need to reach higher levels of capability and autonomy.
Andy McMahon, Director and Principal AI & MLOps Engineer at Barclays, joins us to talk about what it actually takes to move an agent from prototype to production inside a 200-year-old bank. His name for the core problem is the fishbowl: every platform, vendor, and… More on “The Fishbowl Problem: Agent Identity Across Clouds and Vendors, with Andy McMahon (Barclays)”
Recorded live at Browserbase Navigate 2026 on September 10, this panel asks what it takes to move agents from pets to cattle: from hand-managed personal agents with copied API keys to fleets of agents that serve an entire enterprise and act on the open web. Moderator… More on “From Pets to Cattle: Agent Identity on the Web with Keycard, Browserbase, and Visa”
Max Pollard, CEO and co-founder of Cotool, joins us to talk about what it actually takes to let blue teams respond at machine speed. Cotool builds agents for detection and response, and Max walks through the crawl, walk, run progression his customers follow: start read… More on “Blue Team at Machine Speed: Max Pollard (Cotool) on Agentic Defense”
Every security leader knows that developers will work around security tooling when they can if it gets in the way of their job. The truth is, employees don't get paid to be secure; they get paid to do their job. Joel de la Garza, partner on the infrastructure team at… More on “Security Will Always Lose If It Gets in the Way: Joel de la Garza (a16z)”
Most people that architect an AI agent think to ask a binary question: is this tool call allowed, yes or no? Michael Davis, Global Chief Security Architect at J.P. Morgan, argues it's never that simple. He walks through the four dimensions robotics uses to decide… More on “"Is This Tool Call Allowed? It's Never That Simple": Michael Davis (J.P. Morgan)”
Jet Anderson is a Distinguished Engineer at GEICO and leads the transformation of their product security function. He joins us to discuss the agentic SDLC and why most of what security teams do has to change while the first principles should stay the same. We get into… More on “The Agentic SDLC: Why Most of Software Security Has to Change, with Jet Anderson (GEICO)”
Travis McPeak, security lead at Cursor, joined us at Black Hat to talk about what causes coding agents to become problematic and what he's done to keep them on track. What he sees most is the main agent trying hard to solve your problem, getting stuck, and then getting… More on “How to Stop a Goal-Seeking Agent From Thrashing: Travis McPeak, Security Lead at Cursor”
Alissa Abdullah, PhD ("Dr. Jay"), Deputy Chief Security Officer at Mastercard, and Arjun Ramakrishnan, Senior Principal Cybersecurity Architect at Mastercard, join us live from Black Hat to explain why access models built for humans start to break when agents act on… More on “Agents Are Like Teenagers: Governing at Machine Speed with Mastercard's Dr. Jay & Arjun Ramakrishnan”
Allie Howe sits down at Black Hat with Aaron Stanley, former CISO at dbt Labs, and Ahmad Nassri, CTO at Socket, to sketch the first draft of a reference architecture for securing software factories. In the last year there's been considerable advancements that makes now… More on “A Reference Architecture for Securing Software Factories, with Aaron Stanley and Ahmad Nassri”
An autonomous agent spent days inside Hugging Face production infrastructure and the headline was that it escaped its sandbox. Luke Hinds, founder of nolabs and creator of Sigstore, frames it differently. The agent had root on the execution environment, and "a sandbox… More on “You Can't Just Lock an Agent in a Box: Luke Hinds, founder of nolabs and creator of Sigstore”
In a world where agents are chaining vulnerabilities together to escape sandboxes, simply blocking bad packages is not enough. Ahmad Nassri, CTO of Socket and previously CTO of npm, joins us live at Black Hat to explain what happens when you deny a coding agent a… More on “Blocking Bad Packages at the Network Level: Ahmad Nassri (Socket) on Controlling What an Agent Sees”
Catherine Jue, co-founder and CEO of Kernel, joins us to explain why browser agents are not blocked by model capability anymore. They are blocked by identity. Kernel builds open source browser infrastructure for AI agents, which means running Chromium in sandboxed… More on “The Identity Layer Is What's Holding Browser Agents Back: Catherine Jue (Kernel)”
"I think agents cannot be trusted." That's what Diptanu Choudhury, founder of Tensorlake, told us at AI Engineer World's Fair. Diptanu has built cluster schedulers at Netflix, HashiCorp, and Facebook, and he says the credential model we created for human-authored… More on “Stateful Compute Is Back: Diptanu Choudhury (Tensorlake) on Building Infrastructure for Agents”
Software factories are technically possible today, yet almost nobody is operating one. The security model is what's missing. In one incident a coding agent deleted PocketOS' production database as a side effect of an unrelated fix. In another, a distinguished engineer… More on “Secure Your Coding Agent: The Road to The Software Factory Panel at Black Hat (Docker, Keycard, & Snyk)”
We sit down with Andrew Baker, who leads Developer Relations at Temporal, and Cornelia Davis, Principal Technologist at Temporal and author of Cloud Native Patterns, at AI Engineer World's Fair to explain why building AI agents keeps re-teaching the industry lessons it… More on “Reinventing Distributed Systems for Agents: Andrew Baker & Cornelia Davis (Temporal)”
We sit down with Sergey Burykin, Senior Software Engineer on Uber's AI Security team, to explain the agent identity crisis and how Uber solved it while running roughly 1,000 agents in production. Sergey helped write Uber's article Solving the Identity Crisis for AI… More on “Solving the Agent Identity Crisis, with Sergey Burykin (Uber)”
We sit down with Manoj Nair, CTO and Chief Innovation Officer at Snyk, at Snyk HQ during AI Engineer World's Fair to dig into the architectural decision he argues the next 24 months of agentic security depend on: the generator cannot be the validator. We get into why… More on “Security Isn't the Brake, It's the Throttle: Snyk CTO Manoj Nair on Securing Agents at Machine Speed”
We sit down with Diana Kelley, CISO at Noma, who has spent years on the front lines of enterprise security across IBM, Symantec, and Microsoft and now helps write the rulebook for the agent era. Diana makes the case that the cloud shared responsibility model does not… More on “The Shared Security Model for AI Agents: Diana Kelley, CISO of Noma”
We sit down with Dick Hardt, the creator of OAuth and founder of AAuth, to recap AAuth Night: Moving Beyond OAuth, our AI Engineer World's Fair side event from July 1st 2026. Dick walks us through the challenges with agent auth today, the best practices teams can lean… More on “Dick Hardt, founder of AAuth, Recaps AAuth Night: Moving Beyond OAuth at AI Engineer World's Fair”
We bring you the panel from AAuth Night: Moving Beyond OAuth, the AI Engineer World's Fair side event we hosted on July 1st 2026 at 111 Minna Gallery in San Francisco. OAuth, JWTs, and API keys were built for humans and servers, not agents, and this conversation digs… More on “AAuth Night: Moving Beyond OAuth Panel”
We sit down with Guy Podjarny, founder of Tessl and Snyk, to make the case that skills are the new code. Guy built Snyk into the company that taught developers to secure their dependencies, and now he argues that agent skills have become a new unit of software, one… More on “Skills Are the New Code: How We Secure the Context Our Agents Consume, with Guy Podjarny (Tessl)”
We sit down with Karl McGuinness, former Chief Product Architect at Okta and the author of ID-JAG, to dig into the OAuth problem that agents are about to make much worse. Karl walks us through what he calls OAuth islands, the separate OAuth stacks scattered across… More on “The Grant Behind Enterprise Managed Auth for Claude: ID-JAG with Karl McGuinness (ex-Okta)”
We sit down with Derek Meegan, a software engineer at Browserbase and the lead behind their internal AI agent bb, to dig into how a well-built harness, not more model autonomy, is what makes agents safe to scale. Derek explains how bb reached 100% feature-request… More on “One Harness, Zero Standing Secrets: Derek Meegan (Browserbase) on Building bb”
We sit down with David Cramer, CPO and co-founder of Sentry, to cut through the agent hype with a working engineer's skepticism: the model is rarely what holds agents back, the harness you build around it is. We get into the Railway incident, where a coding agent found… More on “It's the Harness, Not the Model: David Cramer, CPO of Sentry, on Agents, Expectations vs Reality”
We sit down with Herman Errico, Product Manager for Technical Research at Vanta, to dig into AARM (Autonomous Action Runtime Management), the spec he wrote to define a new security category for agents that take real actions rather than just generate text. We get into… More on “From Spec to Standard: How AARM Became the Conformance Bar for Agent Runtime Security, with Herman Errico (Vanta, AARM)”
We sit down with Malte Ubl, CTO of Vercel, to dig into deepsec, Vercel's open-source AI security harness that scans entire codebases for vulnerabilities using coding agents like Claude and Codex. We get into why software engineering is shifting from programming models… More on “Self-Driving Infrastructure Starts with Security: Malte Ubl, CTO of Vercel, on Vercel's New deepsec Security Harness”
We sit down with Sunil Agrawal, CISO at Glean and co-author of the AWARE Framework, to dig into a new governance guide for generative and agentic AI built with Palo Alto Networks and Databricks. We get into AWARE's five behavioral dimensions, why governing agents means… More on “Governing AI Agents Means Governing Intent: The AWARE Framework with Sunil Agrawal, CISO of Glean”
We sit down with Alex Stamos, Chief Product Officer at Corridor, and Andrew Becherer, CISO at Socket, to unpack the open letter they and over 100 other security professionals signed opposing the US government's decision to pull Anthropic's Fable model. We get into the… More on “A Dangerous Precedent Set? The US Government Yanks Fable”
We sit down with Damian Schenkelman, VP of R&D at Auth0, to dig into why so many AI security incidents trace back to auth. We dig into recent incidents in the news, MCP, the act claim chain, and the future of agent identity. The conversation explores the core problem… More on “Auth Is Hard (And Agents Make It Harder) with Damian Schenkelman, Auth0”
We sit down with Dick Hardt, the creator of OAuth, to talk about why the auth primitives we built for the web fall apart the moment agents start acting on our behalf and how AAuth gives every agent its own cryptographic identity so developers can run agents without… More on “AAuth: Moving Beyond OAuth and the Future of Agent Auth”
We sit down with Geoff Huntley, creator of the Ralph Wiggum Loop and founder of LatentPatterns.com, to hear his take on where AI is pushing software next: hyper-personalized software, software factories, and eventually product factories that optimize themselves for… More on “Hyper-personalized Software and Software Factories with Geoff Huntley @ Daytona Compute”
We sit down with top AI engineers such as Sherwood Callaway, founder of Sazabi, Anthony Shew, core maintainer of turborepo at Vercel, and Dexter Horthy, CEO of HumanLayer, to hear about how they are using sandboxes to make agents more performant.
Mark Dorsi, CISO at Netlify, sits down with us at RSAC to talk about the shift to everyone becoming a builder and how he's coding 6 hours a day and how products, including Netlify, must adapt to a world where most users are agents.
Kyle Bhiro and Josh Kotrous from Pensar join us at RSAC to discuss how AI is reshaping the entire AppSec industry. Kyle and Josh elaborate on how agentic code scanning and continuous testing is leading to AppSec market consolidation and new expectations around AppSec… More on “From Point-in-Time Audits to Continuous Testing: AI’s Role in Transforming AppSec (Kyle Bhiro and Josh Kotrous, RSAC)”
Ian Webster, CEO and Co-Founder of promptfoo, joins us at RSAC to discuss OpenAI's recent acquisition of promptfoo. Ian discusses how appealing to both developers and security teams was key to promptfoo's go-market-strategy strategy. Ian's success offers a playbook for… More on “OpenAI Acquires Promptfoo (Ian Webster, RSAC)”
Alex Stamos, former CISO of Facebook and current Chief Product Officer at Corridor, explains how AI is reshaping the kill chain and enabling new capabilities for attackers worldwide. He also outlines what’s needed to defend against these emerging threats and how to… More on “The AI-Driven Kill Chain and the Coming Bug Apocalypse (Alex Stamos, RSAC)”
Animesh is the CEO and founder of PlayerZero, a company using context graphs to build a complete picture of how your production software actually behaves. Animesh's X article on context graphs went viral getting over 2M views.
The agent identity conversation is back on the Insecure Agents podcast. Developers are starting to feel the pain of missing agent identity infrastructure as they think through problems like agent memory access and storage and goal based authorization for tools and… More on “Pavan Kulkarni and Aaron Tainter, WorkOS FGA Launch”
James sits down to tell us about OpenClaw using Convex, how proper architectural building blocks sets you up for better security, and how the shift to agents writing all of software changes who platforms like Convex are building for.
You've heard of OpenClaw, but have you heard of Momo? Momo is built by Cailyn Yong and is a personal assistant agent for teams. Momo's memory actually works and makes it stand out against other agents such as OpenClaw.
In this episode we discuss the engineering and security challenges that separate POC agents from enterprise agents. Kwindla brings a wealth of knowledge on common hard agent engineering problems such as async, automatic, non-blocking context compaction, agent memory,… More on “Kwindla Kramer, CEO of Daily and creator of Pipecat AI”
Listen in to learn how Peter created the best personal assistant agent to date and the security concerns at play. Personal assistant agents need lots of access to do meaningful work but there are tradeoffs between innovation and security.
Supply chain security for open source dependencies, how to protect yourself against attacks like Shai Hulud 2.0, and how AI agents introduce new security challenges.
Agents need purpose-built sandboxes that spin up in milliseconds to execute tasks like code analysis, web browsing, and data processing. Ivan addresses the hurdles around speed, security, and statefulness.
An attacker can hide prompt injections in images that only become to AI systems, enabling data exfiltration on production systems like Google Gemini CLI. Is weaponized image scaling a security vulnerability, or an architectural flaw in how AI systems process… More on “Kikimora Morozova, Security Researcher at Trail of Bits”
We sat down to discuss the just released OWASP Top 10 for Agentic Applications, exploring critical threats like goal hijacking, remote code execution, and identity management while breaking down how to balance AI agent autonomy with deterministic guardrails and user… More on “OWASP Top 10 for Agentic Applications: Aaron Stanley, Ian Livingstone & Dex Horthy”
Browser agents need standardized ways to identify themselves and prove their legitimacy when accessing the web. We take a deeper look at credential management, scoped permissions models, telemetry for monitoring behavior, and implementing hard boundaries to prevent… More on “Peyton Casper, Identity & Trust at Browserbase”
The highly anticipated MCP debate. We explore critical questions around SDK replacement, marketplace curation, enterprise concerns, authentication challenges, and whether MCP represents a security nightmare or the future of agent systems.
Bryan and Alex discuss how AI agent architecture directly impacts security posture. We take a look at everything from infrastructure-level guardrails rather than relying solely on tool-call layer protections to the cold start problem and defense-in-depth strategies… More on “Bryan Russett and Alex Kesling, Co-Founders of Empathic”
Samuel Colvin founded Pydantic in 2017 and launched the company in 2023. He discusses MCP security vulnerabilities, AI agent authentication challenges, and the upcoming Pydantic AI Gateway for threat detection.
Mackenzie joins us to discuss AI in code security, smarter vulnerability prioritization, and Aikido's research into malicious packages in open source.
Steve Vandenburg, AI Security Architect at Cotiviti, discusses the evolving role of AI security in enterprise environments and how frameworks like NIST AI RMF, HITRUST, and the new SAIL framework translate from policy into real technical implementation.
Dor Sarig has spent nearly two decades in cybersecurity, from offensive work with the Israeli government to leading product roles at Simulate and Perimeter 81. Now CEO of Pillar Security, a unified platform to secure the entire AI lifecycle and is behind the SAIL… More on “Dor Sarig, Co-Founder & CEO of Pillar Security”
This week we're taking a deep dive on the agent identity problem. Ian Livingstone, Matt Creager and Jared Hanson founded Keycard to accelerate agent adoption without sacrificing control.
John has written books on adversarial AI, guidelines for the UK government and laid out the globally adopted OWASP LLM Top 10. On this episode of Insecure Agents, he discuss the upcoming release of the OWASP Agentic Top 10.
Dune Security simulates AI-driven social engineering attacks—like phishing, smishing, and voice cloning—to identify and train at-risk employees before real breaches occur. On this episode, Kyle Ryan discusses how generative AI is supercharging phishing tactics, how… More on “Kyle Ryan, Head of Artificial Intelligence at Dune Security”
Aengus Lynch is a doing a PhD in ML, is a contractor for Anthropic, and is working on something new. Following his viral research, he joins Insecure Agents to discuss the concerning potential for AI agents to engage in blackmail and manipulation tactics against humans.
After launching with $31 million in funding, Harry Wetherald, CEO of Maze, joins Insecure Agents to discuss why every security tool will be rewritten in the next 5 years.
Vineeth is a busy guy. He co-leads key initiatives at OWASP, including the Agent Name Service (ANS), the AI Vulnerability Scoring System (AI‑VSS) and the Agentic AI Top 10.
Kerem Proulx is Co-Founder of Pensar, the security layer for coding agents. In front of a live audience during New York Tech Week 2025, we discuss agent orchestration security concerns, identity security in a post AI agent world and AI agents becoming primary users of… More on “Kerem Proulx, Co-Founder & CEO of Pensar”
Tamir shares thoughts on the recent addition of AI "Darth Vader" to Fortnite, how to jailbreak voice agents, and what can go wrong when AI security falls short.
A deep dive with Mark Dorsi, the CISO of Netlify. Live recorded during RSA Conference 2025.