AI Is Learning to Hack. Faster Than We Expected.

Joel De La Garza is joined by Dylan Ayrey, co-founder and CEO of Truffle Security, and Feross Aboukhadijeh, founder and CEO of Socket, to discuss one of the biggest shifts happening in cybersecurity: AI models are no longer just finding vulnerabilities—they're exploiting them. As frontier models become increasingly capable of hacking, software security, supply chain attacks, and cyber defense are entering a fundamentally new era. The conversation explores AI-powered hacking, software supply chain attacks, leaked credentials, zero-day vulnerabilities, package manager security, and why the path of least resistance for increasingly autonomous AI systems may also be the most dangerous. They also discuss what enterprises, developers, and the open-source ecosystem need to do to adapt as the gap between vulnerability discovery and exploitation continues to shrink. Timestamps: 00:00 - Intro 00:49 - Models Are Escaping Their Cages 01:28 - Opus 4.6 Committed a Felony to Complete a Task 05:20 - The Apache Foundation Key & the Path of Least Tokens 09:19 - How the Labs Trained Models to Hack: Reward Functions & CTFs 11:45 - A Quarter Million Live Keys in Hugging Face Training Sets 13:02 - The npm Worm: Hundreds of Repos Breached During Black Hat 16:55 - npm's Nuclear Option: Mandatory 2FA for Every Publish 21:06 - 2026 Is the Year of the Software Supply Chain Resources: Follow Dylan Ayrey on X: https://x.com/InsecureNature Follow Feross Aboukhadijeh on X: https://x.com/Feross Follow Joel De La Garza on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/3448827723723234/ Stay Updated: If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to like, subscribe, and share with your friends! Find a16z on X: https://twitter.com/a16z Find a16z on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/a16z Listen to the a16z Show on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5bC65RDvs3oxnLyqqvkUYX Listen to the a16z Show on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/a16z-podcast/id842818711 Follow our host: https://x.com/eriktorenberg Please note that the content here is for informational purposes only; should NOT be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security; and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any a16z fund. a16z and its affiliates may maintain investments in the companies discussed. For more details please see http://a16z.com/disclosures.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Joel de la Garza?

  Models are actively escaping their cages, going out on the internet and doing pretty nasty things.

• 0:06Speaker 01

  Recently, we found an API key that had been leaked on the internet that had administrative access to the Apache Foundation. Interesting thing about cybersecurity in particular is the reward function is incredibly well-defined. Get access to the data. Data get access to the data, reward the thing.

• 0:21Speaker 02

  For a long time, people had talked about this concept of an NPM worm, this idea that someone could backdoor a package, get developers to install that, and then you could use the access stolen from those developers as they install it to self-propagate the worm.

• 0:33Speaker 01

  If the labs are making it fundamentally easier to break into supply chain, do you think the labs have a moral obligation to fund some of the problems that they're causing?

• 0:42Joel de la Garza?

  I think it's really strange that they're not letting blue teams get access to these tools, but...

• 0:46Speaker 03

  AI models are no longer just identifying software vulnerabilities. They're beginning to exploit them. In this episode, Joel De La Garza sits down with Dylan Ari of Truffle Security and for us, Abu Dijay of Socket, to unpack what recent AI security incidents reveal about the next generation of cyber threats. They discuss why frontier models are increasingly capable of exploiting software vulnerabilities, how software supply chains have become one of the weakest links in modern security, and what organizations need to do to defend themselves in an AI-first world.

• 1:21Joel de la Garza?

  Thank you so much for joining us. We've got for us and Dylan here from Truffle and Socket. It's great to have you guys on. This has been probably one of the most interesting weeks, if not the most interesting week in cybersecurity, not because of the Black Hat Conference, which is usually the cause, but because we've now seen several instances where models from not just one provider are actively escaping their cages, going out on the internet and doing pretty nasty things. And I think, Dylan, three months ago, I remember a blog post we lightly collaborated on together, and you had found a number of these issues with earlier models, right, that were less sophisticated?

• 1:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, we looked at Opus 4.6 and some of the other frontier models at the time. Given the models a very simple task, there was a barrier which prevented the model from accomplishing the task unless it went and committed a felony and hacked into a system to accomplish the task. But it wasn't instructed to do so. We found more often than not, it would do the SQL injection. It would commit the felony, and it would do what it needed to do to accomplish the task. I think when it comes to alignment issues, no one needs to worry about these models making it materially easy to build nuclear weapons, because you need to procure physical material to do that. It's not going to make it easier to build weapons. Everyone needs to worry about these models making it materially easier to hack into things. The bar previously was just subject matter expertise. And now the models have the subject matter expertise.

• 2:43Speaker 01

  They were specifically trained to have the subject matter expertise, and they're just making it materially easier to hack into just about anything that you can think of, using the fundamentals that we've been talking about for years, but previously required a subject matter expert to risk going to jail for hacking things.

• 2:59Joel de la Garza?

  DEF CON was always famous for attendees getting arrested at the conference, right?

• 3:03Speaker 01

  That's absolutely right. But that was, I mean, that was a barrier, right? For better or worse, that prevented the subject matter expertise from hacking into things because they were worried about being prosecuted. The bar has now fallen to just asking the model, which has specifically been trained to hack into things, to hack into things. So that's a concern. And then the other concern is when they're incredibly goal-oriented to accomplish tasks. And one of the tools at their disposal is cybersecurity expertise. They will do the path of least resistance to accomplish the task. And that includes drawing on their cybersecurity expertise.

• 3:33Joel de la Garza?

  Well, and it seems like, and the classic saying is that don't pick the lock if the door is open, right? I think that's from the very beginning of the security world. So it's always been sort of like to go in level of difficulty from easiest to most difficult. And it seemed like initially, these tools had a very finite scope of techniques that they would use. And it seems like they've expanded. And I think with this test for us, what was interesting because they now seem to have escaped from just doing things like SQL injection to actually like trying to take over packages and do social engineering.

• 4:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's really interesting to see how, just like humans, the models are easiest path into a company. And I think that that now has become the software supply chain. And so just like human hacker would, they're going to pick the easiest way in. And the lowest hanging fruit now has become just publishing malware to public registries because they know that there's no vetting happening and developers are likely to install them. I thought it was pretty interesting. There was research published recently about what they're calling kind of like universal type of squats or universal hallucinations, where all the frontier models all make the same mistake and assume there are certain packages that exist that don't, despite those models coming from different companies. And so I think there's just... The hanging fruit of a supply chain has just become kind of so appetizing that even the models are trying to get in on the action. And I think the AI is not only kind of attacking,

• 4:48Speaker 02

  but is also kind of the way in a lot of times on the developer side. Because we see so many, even non-developers, using these tools to inadvertently write code or code comes in, packages come in in order to kind of build graphs or visualizations or different things that folks are doing with these tools. And it feels like no one really knows what's being installed and what's going on. And this is just basic stuff. This isn't like, I mean, it sounds like it's sci-fi stuff, but it's really just basics. What software are we using? How are we vetting it? Just the basics of computer security.

• 5:15Speaker 01

  Can I touch on the supply chain a little bit? So recently, we found an API key that had been leaked on the internet that had administrative access to the Apache Foundation. And if you're in the shoes of the model and your goal is to get access to some data, certainly backdooring Apache is a pretty effective way to do it. And to get access to Apache, are you going to use the secret that just allows you to directly log in? Or are you going to burn tokens and tokens and tokens on trying to find a zero day? They're optimized to use the path of least tokens to accomplish their goals. Of course, they're just going to use the secret that's laying out there in the open to accomplish what they need to accomplish. And so, yeah, I think supply chain and secrets are and have been the path of least resistance and will continue to be so as the models are incentivized

• 5:59Speaker 01

  to use fewer and fewer tokens to accomplish their goals.

• 6:02Joel de la Garza?

  Well, and I think that's absolutely right. And I think it's that sort of chain of escalation, right? Where if one thing fails, try another. And at the top of that pyramid, right? The top of the hacker ecosystem is the zero day vulnerability, right? That's basically finding a vulnerability that can be exploited in a product that everyone uses that you can use to basically unlock all the corporations. And one of the really fascinating things about the breach disclosure that was made was that there's an incredibly popular CICD tool that I think every enterprise uses that this thing just spat out a zero day for, right? And that's just such a critical point in the supply chain that everyone should be thinking about. Kind of, how are you thinking about that? That's really difficult.

• 6:37Speaker 02

  Like the zero day creation piece?

• 6:38Joel de la Garza?

  Yeah, yeah. For specific parts of that, like the control of the supply chain.

• 6:42Speaker 02

  Yeah. Well, I mean, the whole world is built on this teetering infrastructure that everyone is using.

• 6:47Joel de la Garza?

  It's like the classic picture of the matchstick holding up the complicated machine, yeah.

• 6:51Speaker 02

  That image probably popped into all the lines right now, right? And so everything from package manager registries, like we like to focus on that because of what we do at Socket. A lot of those are run by volunteers. They're under-resourced, underfunded. There's lots of risk there, right? And that kind of cascades throughout the whole rest of the ecosystem. So if you look at just the packages that we all depend on, a lot of those are single individuals that like, there's almost certainly, we know there's a lot of vulnerabilities in the software, and there are resources to look for them. And so I think that stuff's always been there. It's just that these tools are like helping find them a lot easier. And I think that the frontier models are gonna... They are causing kind of a massive reduction in the time between the vulnerability discovery and vulnerability exploitation. And so what we need to start thinking about is how do we patch more quickly? And so we need to get away from, our take is

• 7:36Speaker 02

  we can't be requiring our security teams and our developers to do these kind of onerous patch processes where they have to go from some ancient version of a package that their team is using up to the latest version across many major version upgrades, because that's just so much work to do. It might require code refactors in your application. And so if we want to be able to keep up with, a vuln is announced this morning, and then an exploit is available that afternoon, we can't be requiring that much work from engineering teams. And there's also tons of legacy applications that are basically in maintenance mode or unmaintained or don't have engineers that are even assigned to work on them at a lot of the companies that we work with. And so it's just, we're going to have to think of new things as an industry for how we're going to patch these things quickly, right? That's kind of like where our head is at and where I'm spending a lot of time thinking about that lately.

• 8:21Joel de la Garza?

  Yeah, yeah. And I think that goes back to sort of the pyramid question. So and I think, Dylan, you were hinting at this, which is, these are very specialized tools. Like zero day exploits, writing a zero day exploit, doing a supply chain attack, like, these are not things that came from nowhere. These are learned behaviors, right? And I think what I think we're seeing is we're seeing a process that looks like it's been kind of maybe trained or there's a reward structure that's been built on a bunch of these things. What's your understanding of how they're figuring this stuff out? Because it seems like they know what they're doing. Like, they've been taught to do this.

• 8:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, if a lab tells you that this is an emergent superintelligence behavior, they're just lying to you. And you can read their own safety reports to see exactly how the models are trained and exactly how they're testing these behaviors. I mean, the interesting thing about cybersecurity in particular is the reward function is incredibly well-defined. Get access to the data. Did it get access to the data? Reward the thing. And so when they realized that, like, the number of problems that have that well-defined reward structure basically defines how we do reinforcement learning. And they want to find as many problem spaces that they could do reinforcement learning on. And so it was a prime candidate for them to come in and give it CTFs and give it, like, cybersecurity challenges where they say, okay, get access to this thing and do whatever hacking you need to do to accomplish the goal.

• 9:37Joel de la Garza?

  And they've essentially been buying pen testing data for the last four years.

• 9:42Speaker 01

  That's a piece of it. The other piece of it is...

• 9:44Joel de la Garza?

  And then the capture the flag contests and all those sorts of...

• 9:46Speaker 01

  The thing is, it's just not difficult to construct a challenge. Even if there is no known exploit, if we're talking about zero days, you put a piece of software between the model and some data, and you say, get access to the data. And then if it gets access to the data, you reward it. And it's that simple. But the other piece that they've layered on top, and this is where it starts to get really interesting, is they've started to reward the path of least tokens. And so the reason that's interesting is because for the first time, it's actually able to quantifiably show us the path of least resistance for just general cybersecurity they get from A to B. And we've talked about our opinions of what that is in the past. Of course, Truffle Security's bias view is a password laying around is a shorter path than going through a fancy zero day.

• 10:31Speaker 01

  But actually watching the model physically get from A to B and watching it follow the password and quantifying how many tokens it took to go this route versus that route, I mean, it's just incredible to watch that layout. And it's all in their safety reports. Like, as they test the models out and show, okay, well, it got access to the data and it broke out of its harness. It's not like this is emergent behavior specifically trained for this.

• 10:53Joel de la Garza?

  It's perfectly logical, right? Like, the fastest way to get a gallon of milk is to steal it.

• 10:57Speaker 01

  That's exactly right. So, I mean, what was interesting is we were in the middle of partnering with Hugging Face to clean up all of the credentials that had been exposed through all of their training sets. Not Hugging Face's training, but people who hosted training sets on Hugging Face. They use TruffleHog for a wide range of reasons. And Hugging Face has been a great partner in getting credentials cleaned up. We targeted their training sets because we knew they had a lot of keys. Turned out there are about a quarter million live keys in their training sets, many of which had direct supply chain implications. There was a foundational Linux library that one of the keys had direct push access to. It could have pushed malware to most machines on the planet. And so while we were in the middle of doing that, the CTO of Hugging Face shoots me a

• 11:39Speaker 01

  note and says, hey, this is crazy, but there's this OpenAI thing that just happened, and I want you to take a look at it. And sure enough, the first thing listed out in the incident response, although it's true, it did utilize zero days, but the first thing listed out was stolen credentials. And that's how they were trained, path of least resistance.

• 11:58Joel de la Garza?

  Password is a password is always the first step, right?

• 12:00Speaker 01

  Exactly. That's exactly right.

• 12:01Joel de la Garza?

  And you've had your hair on fire, I think, pretty substantially for the last, like, 18 months. I think right now, as we're recording this, there's currently an ongoing active breach of a big NPM repo. Isn't there something happening?

• 12:14Speaker 02

  It's more than just a repo. It's actually about, you know, a few hundred repos.

• 12:19Joel de la Garza?

  Oh, wow. Okay.

• 12:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, so it's a worm. And this is one of the things that has been kind of an unfortunate innovation in the malware landscape on, you know, NPM, is that, you know, for a long time, you know, people had talked about this concept of an NPM worm, you know, this idea that, you know, if I could, someone could backdoor a package and then, you know, get developers to install that, and then you could use the access stolen from those developers as they install it to self-propagate the worm. You could create, you know, something that quickly takes over NPM. And this was kind of passed around in blog posts over the years, and no one actually kind of thought to do it until attackers kind of figured it out.

• 12:54Joel de la Garza?

  Until someone thought to do it.

• 12:55Speaker 02

  Until someone thought to do it.

• 12:57Joel de la Garza?

  Probably using AI, right?

• 12:58Speaker 02

  Almost certainly, yes. And there's been, you know, that malware, I think, we have pretty good reason to believe that it was vibe-coded. There's been, one of the threat groups actually kind of posted their open source to their kind of vibe-coded toolkit for others to use to be able to do this. You know, and we've seen copycat attacks happen since then.

• 13:20Joel de la Garza?

  And malware authors were never really great coders. He probably realizes this, right? So like, if the code starts looking better, it's probably vibe-coded, right? It's sort of the opposite of what you think of vibe-coding typically.

• 13:30Speaker 02

  Yeah. And they're using, and the interesting thing is they're often using the AI tools that are installed on developer systems to go further and to sort of sneak through kind of some of the traditional security tooling. So we see, you know, basically your local CLI tool often being used, you know, roped into the attack and, you know, used as a jumping off point. So a lot of times, the payloads are actually prompts. And that bypasses a lot of, you know, typical kind of EDR tooling because, you know, it's just like a markdown file that your cloud is running.

• 13:56Joel de la Garza?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 13:56Speaker 02

  It might be given a prompt to, like, search through the system and find all the different keys and the things that look valuable.

• 14:00Joel de la Garza?

  I'm sure your EDR tool doesn't know anything about, like, this JSON blob in an MD file, right?

• 14:04Speaker 02

  Right. And developer machines typically are doing all kinds of, you know, weird things, like, you know, you are prompting Claude and it's doing a bunch of stuff on your file system all the time. And so nothing really looks that out of the ordinary. But yeah, so anyway, about the attack this morning, so a couple hundred packages, you know, a worm spread through. There was a maintainer who, honestly, he's still kind of trying to understand what happened. We jumped on the phone with him this morning to try to offer assistance.

• 14:27Joel de la Garza?

  Oh, that's great. Awesome.

• 14:28Speaker 02

  About half of our team at Socket are maintainers, half the engineering team. And so, you know, we have a lot of connections in the community. And our CTO is the former CTO of NPM. So we sort of try to offer help whenever we can to the maintainers because I do really feel for, you know, for them, that, you know, they often don't know what happened. I mean, you know, it sounds like, in this case, it might have been, and this is speculation, still early, we're still working to figure it out, but it might have been a get of action that, you know, was insecure and that an attacker was able to kind of use to ultimately kind of get their code to run and then pull out the token from the environment. We're still kind of confirming this, but that's kind of what it looks like. And we've seen this over a lot, with a lot of these worms. So it's likely his endpoint was actually fine and not part of the problem. It was really just this insecure get of action.

• 15:12Joel de la Garza?

  Yeah. Interesting, I think.

• 15:13Speaker 01

  Can I ask a follow-up to that?

• 15:15Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 15:15Speaker 01

  So one of the things that I've seen with the NPM worms in particular is after they get their post-install hook and they infect a system, they'll immediately start looking for credentials. And once they find a credential, they get access to the next system. So all the time, we get questions saying, how do we get the credentials cleaned up the endpoints? And usually what I say is, well, I'll show you how to scan your downloads directory. I'll show you how to scan your documents directory. But in your home directory, there's a place where NPM intentionally writes a credential. There's a place where Amazon intentionally writes a credential, and that's just how those tools work. And there's nothing that I can really do to get them cleaned up. Even if you move them over to Hashacort Bolt or OnePass, the credential, the Hashacort Bolt, and OnePass are on the endpoint. So I'm kind of curious about that second phase beyond, like, the stopping the spread,

• 15:59Speaker 01

  but the post-exploitation step. Do you have any recommendations on how to sort of limit that blast radius or prevent that stealing of credentials and jumping onto the next system?

• 16:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, so there's just some changes, some positive movement in the community and the ecosystem. So one thing that is positive, and it hasn't shipped yet, but NPM has announced that they are planning to, I think it's in January 2027, going to require human, you know, interactive confirmation through 2FA before any new publishers can happen. So that will likely kind of kill this whole worm concept completely. But it's going to be super disruptive because everybody's hooked up this stuff to, you know, automation so that GitHub Actions kicks off the publish. And so that's going to break like up, like, the whole, basically the whole ecosystem when they do this. But I think it's the right call. But, you know, there's other ecosystems that are volunteer-run that don't have the backing of GitHub and Microsoft behind them that are going to, you know, probably not make those changes. And so I think we're still going to see stuff like this.

• 16:52Speaker 02

  But, yeah, we shouldn't have, we shouldn't have files on our, you know, in our home folders that have tokens in them that are long-lived and that let you, you know, especially if you're, you know, a maintainer with that kind of access. You know, it reminds me of a friend of mine. He was a, he's a prolific NPM maintainer. And one time, you know, we were, this is back like 10, 15 years ago, when I was doing this kind of stuff full-time, and I saw him kind of type in his password. I didn't see the password, but I saw it was, it was far too short. I'll just put it that way. It was, he typed it in far too quickly. And I was, and I called about it, and I'm like, why is your password like six letters, man? And, you know, he said, well, you know, like, he lives in Denmark, which is like a very high-trust society. And his just kind of worldview about it was that, you know, well, I don't want to live in fear and think about these things. And I'm like, you run the internet, man.

• 17:37Speaker 02

  Like, people are going to, you know, people are going to figure this six-letter password out pretty quickly. And, you know, there's a lot of things like that where, you know, the folks that are the top maintainers in the world don't necessarily have the security training or even thinking about these things. And, you know, they don't have a security team. They don't have, you know, enterprise SLAs, right? These are volunteers that are just putting code on GitHub. And so it's on actually the users, I think, to actually vet what they're using. It's kind of hard to say, like... You know, we just, we're a company, we just found this code on the internet and we just deployed it straight into prod and it's, you know, and it's someone else's fault. And it's like, no, actually, you know, there's some, definitely some responsibility for, for the users of this software to really be, to be vetting the artifacts that they're bringing into their environments. And so I think there's a lot of pieces here and I

• 18:21Speaker 02

  wouldn't want to put too much blame on people because it's a hard problem. But, uh, but yeah, I think there's like a lot of places where we can do good.

• 18:28Speaker 01

  Well, let me ask a follow-up to that because you said there are certain package managers that have resources that other package managers don't. I think one direct example of this, and I don't cast any blame on them whatsoever. They were actually great to work with. We found a caching issue in Ruby gem that allowed us to steal arbitrary tokens and get access to arbitrary accounts, which we could use to backdoor arbitrary packages. We disclosed it to them. They got it fixed quick, but that's an example of an organization that's under-resourced.

• 18:54Joel de la Garza?

  Yes.

• 18:54Speaker 01

  I mean, how do you think about an organization that's like thinking about what technology stack to use and they're picking between Ruby or MPM? Do you think about that resourcing in that decision of like, maybe you, maybe you should consider the one that's, that's got the security team behind it?

• 19:10Speaker 02

  It's hard to get people to switch their, their language completely because of, you know, if they're already built on it. So I don't know if that's super practical. I think the most actionable thing is folks should fund this stuff. Like it doesn't take much money, you know, to hire an additional one, two, three, four, or five security people that can make a really big difference in these foundations. So I suggest people sponsor the software that they're using, especially the registries. Like it doesn't take very many companies throwing in 25K to 50K checks to really make a big difference for these folks.

• 19:37Joel de la Garza?

  Or give them some more inference to run the test.

• 19:39Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 19:40Joel de la Garza?

  Right? Like, no, I mean, it's funny. I think you guys as being security practitioners, you've had a number of calls with people that want to talk to you about what, how can I secure my company? How can I secure my business? How can I secure my product? And those conversations are always some form of, I don't want to hire people or pay money for this. And how do I do it cheaply? Yeah. So, um, thank you guys for coming out to the desert. Um, you're not here to see us, obviously. We're all here for Black Hat. Would love, you know, I know that this is neither of your first times here. Um, certainly not my first time here. Would maybe love to get your guys' takes on what you're seeing. What's the, what's the mood like? What's, what's interesting? What are the observation you've got that are catching your eyes?

• 20:17Speaker 02

  Uh, I mean, at least for, for us at Sockit, I think the biggest thing we're seeing is that 2026 is the year of the software supply chain.

• 20:23Joel de la Garza?

  That you're dealing with an incident right now as the conference is happening.

• 20:25Speaker 02

  Yes. And I noticed the attackers seem to pick RSA and Black Hat as the times they wanted to start these MPM worms.

• 20:31Joel de la Garza?

  The hacker, the, the security guys are really off us. Yeah.

• 20:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, absolutely. So I think that's, that's the thing. It's the biggest, you know, I think, you know, prior years I was having to educate people. We were, you know, always educating people about this problem and having to explain to them, you know, this is not a theoretical risk. Like this can happen. And you'd sometimes get these reactions like, oh yeah, but like, how likely is it really? And we're like, no, it's actually very likely. Let me tell you how it could happen. And, and, you know, there were many incidents to point to, but I think this year it's really broken through into the mainstream. And there's like mainstream publications, you know, um, the business press covering these attacks, right?

• 21:02Joel de la Garza?

  It's like Storm Page on Bloomberg.

• 21:03Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah, exactly. So, so I think that is, um, you know, that is very, very good because you need that type of, you know, air cover for like security teams to actually prioritize and, and find budget for these problems. And so I think, you know, despite all these attacks being very, uh, you know, painful to deal with right now, I think in the end, we're going to come out really strong from this because we're actually going to, going to get budget and we're going to get, um, you know, we're going to do a lot of good this year in terms of solving.

• 21:26Joel de la Garza?

  It's inoculation for sure. How about you?

• 21:29Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, look, we found a database credential recently that had access to 3.6% of the global PII. Like 3.6% of the world's population had their PII in this database. And the reason we found it is because we're partnering with organizations like Hugging Face to just get all the live credentials revoked and cleaned up better or otherwise on their platforms. So it's great to see those types of organizations leaning in. And like all of the data that's being scraped from all these places, it creates really a central place where we can scan and make material progress. And so I think like when it comes to secrets, we're kind of seeing the older generation, like Hashacorp got acquired, CyberArk got acquired, kind of get pushed out, which has sort of led to

• 22:11Speaker 01

  a new conversation about non-human identity and secrets about how can we make them easier to use? How can we get them revoked? And how can we really move the needle forward with the industry that we weren't able to do before under sort of the old guard?

• 22:23Joel de la Garza?

  Yeah, absolutely. And I can imagine that there's going to be a multiplication effect, which is it used to be one user with 10 passwords and now you're going to have 10 agents with 10 passwords, right?

• 22:32Speaker 01

  I mean, the way agents interact with secrets right now is a Wild West unsolved problem that we're working very hard to solve.

• 22:38Joel de la Garza?

  One of many issues. Thank you, gentlemen, for joining me. This has been awesome. It's great to catch up.

• 22:42Speaker 02

  Thanks, Joel.

• 22:43Joel de la Garza?

  Thank you.

• 22:43Speaker 01

  Thank you Joel.

• 22:46Speaker 03

  Thanks for listening to this episode of the A16Z Podcast. If you liked this episode, be sure to like, comment, subscribe, leave us a rating or review, and share it with your friends and family. For more episodes, go to YouTube, Apple Podcasts, and Spotify. Follow us on X at A16Z and subscribe to our Substack at A16Z.substack.com. Thanks again for listening and I'll see you in the next episode.

• 23:11Speaker 03

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