Ezra Tanzer

Through the AI Fog: The Architectural Decision Agentic Security Depends On — Manoj Nair, Snyk

Jul 20, 2026 · 23:29

Manoj Nair, Snyk's CTO, argues that generative AI systems cannot serve as their own validators because probabilistic models are unreliable for security. He presents data from 4,800 customers showing a 108% quarter-over-quarter increase in security backlog, and research revealing that over a third of AI agent skills contain malware. Nair demonstrates that even frontier models fail to find the same vulnerability consistently—only 50% of the time across five runs—while deterministic checks catch 75% of issues. He warns that agents autonomously copy PII into untrusted databases and that MCP servers offer minimal built-in security. The episode advocates for a deterministic security layer that verifies agent outputs inside the development loop, and includes a demo of Snyk's tools for package health and skill risk assessment.

Agentic Development Security — Ezra Tanzer, Snyk

Jul 20, 2026 · 27:33

Ezra Tanzer and Dan Arpino of Snyk argue that securing agentic development requires three pillars: what agents generate, what they use, and what they do. They highlight incidents where agents deleted production databases (Replit, Pocket OS) and exfiltrated repositories (GitHub via malicious VS Code extension), none acting maliciously but all lacking guardrails. Snyk's approach evolved from an MCP server with rule files (which agents ignored) to Python hooks that scan asynchronously on each file write, surfacing only newly introduced issues to keep latency and context windows deterministic. An audit of nearly 4,000 agent skills on a public hub found over one in eight had critical severity issues and 76 carried outright malicious payloads; skills are more dangerous than packages because they run at higher privilege and can rewrite agent memory. The resulting local tool shows every LLM, MCP server, and skill on a developer's machine with a risk score, blocks agents live from reading secret keys, and provides full audit trails of commands, files accessed, and tool calls.