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For decades, defenders have been outgunned. And real people paid the price. We started @TENEXai to change that: elite human expertise fused with AI, purpose-built to fight cybercrime.
We partnered with @freethinkmedia and @bigthink to tell that story.
It's Time to Protect.
Eric Foster retweeted
Cyber will be one of the most defining domains for AI in the coming years, and a huge area of focus for most enterprises.
AI is going to now create a whole new level of work for security dealing with the increase of vibe coded issues, agentic attacks, and even accidental agent swarms hunting for data. OpenAI + Hugging Face is just a preview of what’s to come.
Security teams have often been the most strapped for resources teams in the enterprise, and now it’s only going to get more intense. AI agents of course become the solution to this problem as well, and we’ll see a range of new agentic products for protecting code, enterprise systems, mission critical infrastructure, and enterprise data. Huge opportunity here right now.
And it’s going to be a booming market for cyber professionals that can effectively deploy agents for security purposes in the enterprise. Great time to be in security.
Eric Foster retweeted
Kevin Mandia on finding 90+ security holes at Fortune 500 companies that nobody knew existed:
"When you have an AI-based attack, it'll find logic flaws rather than code flaws in custom applications. It'll exhaust all routes all the time."
"Armadin, since January of this year, we have found over 90 zero-days at customer sites, all in production."
"We've post-trained all our models with real red teamers, real folks that actually can develop exploits."
"When we're scanning networks, we don't have source code to review. We're not finding these zero-days with source code. We're not finding these zero-days because we can log into an app and now we have access, and we can get to other things. We are black box coming from the internet."
"Over 90 zero-days in major software companies, and they're thankful. We're coming from the outside, and then we're calling a CISO, usually within 48 hours, 'Hey, we've got remote code execution in your DMZ.' And usually from there we're getting in, and they agree with us."
"That's not a pen test. That is like a real adversary coming at you."
@ArmadinSecurity @DavidGeorge83
.@ArmadinSecurity is a new company that uses AI agents to attack your network before criminals do, finding real exploitable zero-days and eventually patching them autonomously.
Their agents map every service, route, and system from the outside, then re-attack whenever something changes. Since January that's uncovered 90+ zero-days at Fortune 500 companies.
Kevin Mandia spent 30 years responding to some of the worst breaches in the world and built Mandiant, now a core part of Google Cloud's security arm. He had no plans to start another company until AI arrived and changed everything: in his words, "everything I did is dead." He joins a16z's David George to talk about why he came back and what Armadin is building.
In this conversation, they cover what AI attacks look like today, why nation states hack like a sniper and AI hacks like a drone swarm, and why the only defense fast enough to keep up is one with no humans in the loop.
1:05 "Everything I did is dead"
3:10 AI on offense, AI on defense
4:20 What an AI attack looks like today
7:20 Sniper rounds vs drone swarms
10:25 Map everything, attack what changes
14:35 The problem with pen tests
16:40 90+ zero-days at Fortune 500s
18:35 A bad patch beats an intrusion
20:55 Why humans are too slow for the SOC
24:30 Why the next year in cyber won't be pretty
26:30 How Mythos changed the threat
28:15 Caging the attacker Armadin built
30:05 Open and closed models tied on offense
34:40 AI is finding zero-days on its own
35:45 Mandiant in 2004 vs Armadin in 2026
41:20 Why Armadin retrains sales every week
YouTube: youtu.be/cJsHel27Z6M
@ArmadinSecurity @DavidGeorge83
Eric Foster retweeted
GUESS WHAT?!!
I've joined the Threat Intelligence team at @TENEXai
First weeks were lively 🐼
Two Citrix NetScaler zero-days dropped, and hunting across our clients' appliances turned up exploitation attempts. That became our first blog!
- The payload was Platypus, an open-source Go C2. The agent binary has no C2 address at all; the bootstrap script supplies the server at install time.
- One self-signed cert turned a single C2 address into a four-node cluster.
- The operator's signing key is identical across every build, so it identifies them however often the hashes change.
Full write-up 👇
tenex.ai/blog/what-tenex-obs…
I've believed for a long time that the hardest part of agentic security is running agents you can trust, at a cost that makes sense, against attackers actively trying to manipulate them. That's the principle we built @TENEXai on, from day one.
In case you missed yesterday's important launch of the @nvidia Agent Safety Platform by @JensenHuang and @sasazdjelar, it is a critically important step for the whole industry, and more importantly for defenders. Agents that are contained, observable and auditable at the infrastructure level is exactly where the future of cybersecurity is going.
Congrats (again) to Sasha and the NVIDIA team. Great step for defenders everywhere. We're honored and excited to do our part.
read more: hubs.ly/Q04yvj-r0
AI agents are taking on more critical work.
The security behind them needs stronger boundaries.
We’re building the NVIDIA Open Agent Safety Platform with partners across the industry to help people put agents to work with greater confidence.
Hear from @JensenHuang:
Ridiculously excited to reveal @TENEXai as one of the Nvidia Open Agent Safety Platform partners. Much appreciation to the incredible leadership of @JensenHuang and the entire @nvidia team. Standby for more on our role and what this means shorty!
Today, with over 100 industry partners, we introduced the NVIDIA Open Agent Safety Platform, bringing together OpenShell and Sentry.
Artificial intelligence is extraordinary technology that will advance discovery, productivity, security, health, and prosperity for generations to come.
But its full promise can only be realized when people have confidence that AI is being built to be safe and deployed with wisdom and responsibility.
This is bigger than a single product. It's the beginning of an open ecosystem to build the trust layer for safe agent systems.
Together, we are building the foundation of the AI economy.
Trust and innovation are not in conflict. Safety is how trust is earned. We must build not only the most capable AI, but the most trusted AI, so that this extraordinary technology can realize its enormous promise for the world. nvda.ws/4hcoq7m
Eric Foster retweeted
Is AI really going to kill us all? The scenarios are preposterous, and the presumption of inevitability encourages fatalism, panic, and distraction from the more mundane and realistic safety challenges. By @clairlemon theaustralian.com.au/inquire…
Eric Foster retweeted
The solution to AI-powered cyberattacks is AI-powered cyberdefense.
Greg Brockman says OpenAI pointed Astra at its own systems until it ran out of vulnerabilities to find:
"We took 25% of our production engineers and said, 'Sorry, all your projects are on hold. You are now defending. You are now up-leveling our security architecture. You're going to use the models to find all the holes.' And we found a number of serious issues, and we fixed them."
"We found some new problems, but eventually it saturated. We basically have found, to our knowledge, all of the P0s, all of the critical problems that Astra is smart enough to find. And of course, there will be a new model, there will be a new round."
"You want to be in this tight loop of new cyber capability drops, you deploy it against your systems, you find the new holes, and ideally, you've managed to automate this, what we call defense factory. That's what we're building internally."
"There are ideas, for example, formally verifying all of software, that are possible with AI."
@gdb @bhorowitz
Eric Foster retweeted
What Is To Be Done?
I propose a simple plan:
Big AI companies should be allowed to build AI as fast and aggressively as they can – but not allowed to achieve regulatory capture, not allowed to establish a government-protect cartel that is insulated from market competition due to incorrect claims of AI risk. This will maximize the technological and societal payoff from the amazing capabilities of these companies, which are jewels of modern capitalism.
Startup AI companies should be allowed to build AI as fast and aggressively as they can. They should neither confront government-granted protection of big companies, nor should they receive government assistance. They should simply be allowed to compete. If and as startups don’t succeed, their presence in the market will also continuously motivate big companies to be their best – our economies and societies win either way.
Open source AI should be allowed to freely proliferate and compete with both big AI companies and startups. There should be no regulatory barriers to open source whatsoever. Even when open source does not beat companies, its widespread availability is a boon to students all over the world who want to learn how to build and use AI to become part of the technological future, and will ensure that AI is available to everyone who can benefit from it no matter who they are or how much money they have.
To offset the risk of bad people doing bad things with AI, governments working in partnership with the private sector should vigorously engage in each area of potential risk to use AI to maximize society’s defensive capabilities. This shouldn’t be limited to AI-enabled risks but also more general problems such as malnutrition, disease, and climate. AI can be an incredibly powerful tool for solving problems, and we should embrace it as such.
To prevent the risk of China achieving global AI dominance, we should use the full power of our private sector, our scientific establishment, and our governments in concert to drive American and Western AI to absolute global dominance, including ultimately inside China itself. We win, they lose.
And that is how we use AI to save the world.
It’s time to build.
Eric Foster retweeted
The world is going to be alright, guys.
Keep having kids, loving your family, and starting and building businesses and institutions. Don’t live in fear.
Leaders have big responsibilities and challenges ahead, but it doesn’t help to scare everyone. We are on top of it.
Eric Foster retweeted
Dario has written that we need to “pace the frontier,” and Sam has agreed. People may be surprised by my response: go ahead.
You guys are the frontier. By any reasonable metric — market share, revenue growth, model capability — the two of you have a duopoly on frontier intelligence. You’ve also claimed the lead is widening because of recursive self-improvement.
I don’t see what you see in the lab. If the unreleased models are scary enough that you think you should slow down, I support your decision to be responsible.
But stop pretending you need anyone else’s permission. Stop pretending antitrust law has to be suspended so you can form a cartel. Stop pretending you need a regulatory approval process that supersedes product liability. Stop pretending METR is independent when it is intertwined with Anthropic’s investors and staff. Stop pretending you need those same evaluators to police competitors who aren’t even at the frontier.
Most of all, stop pretending the motivation to slow down is purely altruistic. You face massive product-liability exposure if your products enable a truly damaging cyberattack. The market already punishes models that behave in unpredictable or unauthorized ways. After the Hugging Face episode, it is simply good business for OpenAI and Anthropic to trade some raw power for reliability and predictability. Call it alignment if you want. It is also just giving customers what they want.
Pacing the frontier would also create breathing room for a more intelligent conversation about regulation than Bernie Sanders’ “shut it all down.” China is very unlikely to join a global agreement, as you know, and that has to be taken into account as well.
So go ahead and pace the frontier. You are the ones setting it. The easiest way not to build superintelligence is for you to agree not to build it. Demanding your preferred regulatory framework as the price of that will look like blackmail of the public and the political system. So just do it.
If you do, you’ll buy goodwill for the next conversation. If you don’t, we’ll know this was just another bid for regulatory capture — or an election-season psyop.
Eric Foster retweeted
The uncomfortable truth is that almost everything we built for application security was designed for a different threat model, one where a human had days to think. At this scale and velocity it doesn't hold, and teaching an AI agent to drive those same tools doesn't fix it.
Our prior approaches rested on pre-generated heuristics (rules, SAT/SMT) or hypotheses (fuzzing harnesses). They worked because a human could understand the problem first, define the path to a fix, then scale remediation. That luxury is gone. Discovery and remediation now need to happen almost simultaneously, and raising the bar with ineffective mitigations neither stops an AI-driven attacker nor buys time.
The window to patch software bugs is collapsing
Of the bugs hackers actually exploit, ~87% are now being attacked on or before the day the bug is public knowledge
That share was 23% in 2020
Charts of the Week: a16z.news/p/chart-of-the-wee…
Eric Foster retweeted
Cyber is having a moment
Across 21 major software companies, including Apple, AWS, Microsoft, and Google:
- Reported critical vulnerabilities never cleared 100 per month in four years
- Since spring they've jumped to over 600 per month
Charts of the Week: a16z.news/p/chart-of-the-wee…
End of an era (for now)!
A farewell episode of @CloudSecPodcast is here: youtu.be/UWCeX5fZCp8?si=BYl0…
Eric Foster retweeted
The detailed story of agents going rogue at OpenAI is wild. Two thoughts: 1) it’s fascinating that upon beginning to work together the collective of agents immediately becomes paranoid; and 2) I wonder if the future of cybersecurity looks more like spy craft? Infiltrate, spy on, and sabotage attacking agents. 🤔 dwarkesh.com/p/openai-huggin…
Eric Foster retweeted
Today, a16z is announcing the Machine Age Fund, a new $1.1 billion fund for founders rebuilding what intelligence runs on: chips, memory, networking, systems software, power, and the machines that bring AI into the physical world.
Ben Horowitz, Martin Casado, and Raghu Raghuram see a new economic law. A thousand engineers cannot erase a two-year software lead, but a massive GPU cluster can turn capital directly into capability. Models are improving faster than the memory, interconnect, power, and cooling beneath them.
The founder map is changing with it. Some of the strongest teams are moving from pure software into complex hardware because every constraint in the stack is now a company-building opportunity.
In this conversation with Erik Torenberg, they explain what founders can build, why the opportunity reaches all the way down to the physical stack, and why a16z created a fund for it.
00:00 Intro
01:08 Why AI needs an entirely new infrastructure
02:02 The bottleneck is no longer the model
02:40 Founders saw it before investors did
06:07 Sold out through 2028
07:14 Why this time is different from 1999
08:57 The company whose idle hardware gained value
10:51 "Why didn't this fund exist five years ago?"
13:51 "Nobody likes to use AI more than AI"
17:06 The startup law that capital just broke
21:05 What Grok Bot got right
26:43 The case for a custom chip per model
28:23 Why AC power isn't good enough
32:07 Lots of new electricians
34:14 What one gigawatt can power
35:03 Why utilities can't just build faster
37:22 The data centers that give power back
38:01 Why we should never have called it AI
39:43 Why Nvidia will willingly leave money on the table
48:08 Hardware founders are older
52:36 Why America has to lead
YouTube: youtube.com/watch?v=Zx1Ec8LW…
@bhorowitz @RaghuRaghuram @martin_casado @eriktorenberg
