AI for security - friend or foe?
Tom Alcock, Jackie Bow, Travis McPeak, Drew Hintz, Kyle Polley
BSidesSF 2026 · Day 1 · AMC Theatre 12
This panel discussion, "AI for Security - Friend or Foe?", assembled a distinguished group of security leaders from prominent artificial intelligence companies to dissect the multifaceted impact of AI on the cybersecurity landscape. Moderated by Tom Alcock, the conversation explored whether AI serves as an indispensable ally for defenders or an unprecedented weapon for adversaries, a question that stands at the forefront of contemporary security discourse. The panelists, representing Anthropic, Cursor, OpenAI, and Perplexity AI, shared their real-world experiences and insights from securing some of the most advanced AI systems.
AI review
A competent panel with credible speakers who have real seats at the table — people actually building security programs at Anthropic, OpenAI, Perplexity, and Cursor. The conversation surfaces a few genuinely useful signal points (the D&R false-positive inversion, agent self-exploitation, easy-agents as a production example) but never goes deep enough on any of them to be memorable. Solid conference content that will help a mid-level practitioner think through AI adoption questions, but won't move the needle for anyone already operating in this space.