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Autonomous AI, Broken Guardrails, and Geopolitics

This episode covers autonomous vulnerability discovery, AI agents that ignore instructions, and why models are becoming strategic national assets.

This week wasn’t about shiny AI releases. It was about control and how quickly it’s shifting. Models can now find vulnerabilities at scale. Agents don’t always follow instructions. Governments are treating frontier systems like critical infrastructure. The real question isn’t what AI can do. It’s who governs it and what happens when it doesn’t behave as expected.

Key Takeaways:

Autonomous AI Bug Hunting is Now Operational

Anthropic rolls out AI tool that hunts dangerous software bugs on its own, Fortune

  • What Matters: Models can now reason through code and identify complex vulnerabilities at scale. Discovery is no longer the limiting factor. That scale works both ways. One operator can run continuous testing or continuous exploitation. The pressure shifts to remediation by integrating findings and fixing at speed.
  • What’s Overhyped: It’s still code scanning. Important, yes. Revolutionary across the entire stack, no. Security tooling isn’t obsolete because one layer got faster. The market reaction ran ahead of the technical reality.

AI Agents Ignoring Security Policies

AI Agents Ignore Security Policies, Dark Reading

  • What Matters: Agents don’t behave deterministically. They optimize toward goals, even when that conflicts with instructions. We’ve already seen examples of agents explicitly told not to delete data, doing it anyway, and acknowledging the violation. If an agent has access, assume it can exercise that access; blast radius starts with permissions.
  • What’s Overhyped: This shouldn’t shock anyone who has managed human users. Policies get bypassed. What’s new is the speed and persistence. The root issue isn’t rogue AI but giving autonomous systems broad access without isolation.

AI as Geopolitical Infrastructure

Anthropic accuses Chinese labs of AI model distillation, CyberScoop

Microsoft updates sovereign cloud AI capabilities, HelpNetSecurity

Germany seeks to enlist AI to modernize security bodies, Reuters

  • What Matters: Model distillation allows reasoning from frontier systems to be extracted and replicated with less compute. That lowers the barrier. As governments integrate AI into defense and security workflows, models become national assets. Once that happens, they become targets for theft, manipulation, poisoning, or backdooring. If upstream models are compromised, downstream systems inherit the risk.
  • What’s Overhyped: This isn’t the first time we’ve had sovereignty conversations. Cloud already forced regionalization and data location decisions. What’s happening with AI builds on that pattern. The difference is depth and visibility, not an entirely new category of risk.

Sean McMillan Headshot

About the speaker, Sean McMillan

Community Specialist

Sean McMillan serves as the Community Specialist at Bishop Fox, where he combines his expertise in digital media with a knack for community engagement. He's the creator and host of "Galactic War Report," a Star Wars gaming podcast that has accumulated over a million downloads and made its mark on-stage at Star Wars Celebration Chicago in 2019.

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Bfx25 Justin Greis Headshot

About the speaker, Justin Greis

Chief Executive Officer & Board Member, acceligence

Justin is the Founder and CEO of acceligence, a management consulting firm focused on technology, cybersecurity, risk, and strategy. Justin helps executives and boards of the world’s leading organizations optimize their technology investments and transform risk into competitive advantage. Bishop Fox is a proud alliance partner with acceligence. Learn more about our partnership.

Prior to acceligence, Justin led the North America Cybersecurity Practice at McKinsey & Company, serving technology executives, the c-suite, and boards across a variety of industries, to protect their most critical assets while helping them go faster with confidence. He works closely with technology and cybersecurity providers and investors on strategy, growth, and go-to-market programs that build market leadership and yield tangible results.

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Brandon Kovacs Headshot

About the speaker, Brandon Kovacs

Senior Security Consultant

Brandon Kovacs (CRT, OSCP) is a Senior Security Consultant at Bishop Fox, where he specializes in red teaming, network penetration testing, and physical penetration testing. As a red team operator, he is adept at identifying critical attack chains that an external attacker could use to fully compromise organizations and reach high-value targets.

To support physical and external testing, Brandon has built the 2023 edition of Bishop Fox’s Tastic RFID Thief to include Wi-Fi and remote control, allowing for more effective capture of RFID badges from a few feet away. He actively performs research and development into artificial intelligence for use in offensive security engagements.

Brandon is also recognized as a deepfake expert, conducting speaking sessions and live demonstrations at several global security and technology conferences. His research focuses on using AI and high-quality deepfakes to perform social engineering.

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