Omar Santos is a Distinguished Engineer directing AI Security at Cisco. He’s here for a frank conversation about the realities of security in the agentic era. As more software is created on-the-fly by AI agents at the request of humans, security has to become an ever-present layer. Security will be built into complete agent runtime environments and will require constant human oversight and intervention, augmented by the ability to simulate outcomes to avoid risk. 

Omar is also the Co-Chair of the Coalition for Secure AI, and these are the things he’s thinking about on a daily basis. He sits down with Robb and Josh at the end of a travel blitz that included work surrounding OpenAI’s Stargate Project, a four-year $500b plan for new AI infrastructure in the United States. The trio discuss how the ongoing training of models and the rising demand for inference continue to push the demand for security across burgeoning technology ecosystems. 

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Chapters -

00:00 - Intro and episode setup

00:33 - Meet Omar Santos and his role in AI security

01:00 - Security as the new programming

02:20 - Coalition for Secure AI and security as a new language

04:45 - Identity, access, and AI agents

06:09 - Scaling models and mega data centers

09:04 - Training vs inference and the compute explosion

12:54 - Budgets, compute, and hybrid human–AI security teams

15:16 - Checklists, guardrails, and spec-driven development

20:00 - From IDEs to agent swarms and background agents

25:19 - CodeGuard, rules for coding agents, and secure SDLC

32:00 - Why doing nothing is the biggest AI security risk

39:30 - Validating AI, AI safety levels, and open source dilemmas

46:00 - Private networks, insider AI agents, and embedded security

51:00 - Simulation, digital twins, and business-wide risk modeling

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