Security Track Intro — Randall Degges, Snyk

Hello. How's it going, everyone? Uh, I'm Randall—thanks for the nice intro, Ali. And I'm only up here for a couple minutes; this is going to be very brief. But what I wanted to talk about in the time that I have is kind of the state of AI security, and the things that I've been thinking about quite a lot lately, and maybe things that you've all been thinking about too.

So, I've been a developer and security professional pretty much my entire life. And even though I've been in the security space, the thing that makes me excited in these recent years with the rise of generative AI is being able to build better quality software more quickly.

There's nothing more fun than shipping the things that you're working on to actual users and sparking that sense of joy,right? It almost feels like a cheat code. And I think that there's really a few obstacles to allowing all of us in the room today to do these things at scale in today's world.

So the first thing is something that all of us probably learned the hard way a few years ago, which is: when you're building software using AI, there's always the risk that the code the AI generates might have a security issue.

Everybody knows that. It's nothing new,right? And I think the reason that that's not a big deal is because, first of all, everyone kind of intuitively knows that when humans write code, we generate security issues. When AI models write code, turns out they also generate security issues.

And so having security as part of your development lifecycle is just, like, a core part of, like, modern engineering work, no questions at all. I think the second thing, though, is a little more interesting. It's when you're trying to deploy actual autonomous agents into production, how do you do that in a way that allows you to go to sleep easily and not worry that the agents you deployed are going to go off the rails, do something they're not supposed to do, harm your business or your users, or something else,right?

And that's a much more difficult problem to solve. And then the final thing that I think is a barrier to us, you know, really innovating and moving quickly is almost geopolitics at this point. Like, I don't know about all of you, but how many people were kind of annoyed when access to Fable got pulled?

Show of hands. Yeah, a whole lot of people,right? How many people are a little annoyed they can't use the brand-new OpenAI GPT-5.6 modelright now? Yes, a lot of people. And I think it's interesting because this is all related to security,right?

Like, fundamentally, the biggest problem that I feel we have to still solve in our space is being able to use AI fearlessly and have it be secure by default. And so that's why I'm really excited to announce thatright after this keynote, downstairs on the second floor in room 2005, we're going to be running the first Security Track at the World's Fair for the entire day, with some of the best companies and presenters in the world talking all about these problems and how we can fix them going forward.

So if security is a concern to you like it is to me, please come downstairs, join us. Again, room 2005, second floor. We have presenters from NVIDIA, Anthropic, Keycard, where Ali works, Snyk, of course. We have a ton of amazing content, and it's hopefully going to allow you to level up the stuff that you're building and do it without any worry at all.

So that's really the goal. So with that being said, thank you so much for the time, and hopefully I'll see you down there. I'm Randall, and I'll be emceeing the event all day. Allright, take care, everyone.