Show Notes
AI may be changing how companies build, but it's also changing how they get attacked, often by their own tools. Amazon Chief Security Officer Steve Schmidt has watched threat actors at every skill level get sharper, faster, and harder to contain. The risk he's most focused on, however, isn't coming from outside the firewall.
On this episode of TechCrunch's Equity podcast, we're bringing you a conversation Rebecca Bellan had with Schmidt at the HumanX conference in San Francisco. The two dug into what AI is already doing to the threat landscape and how Amazon is rethinking identity, containment, and human oversight to keep agents in check.
Listen to the full episode to hear about:
Why shadow AI inside your own organization may be a bigger liability than the hackers trying to get in
What agentic identity means in practice, and how Amazon traces every agent action back to a human
How startups with five people (and no CISO) can manage their AI security, and why containment is becoming the defining security challenge of the agentic era
Subscribe to Equity on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. You also can follow Equity on X and Threads, at @EquityPod. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
More from Equity
It seems like every big AI player is building a personal agent. Meta has Muse, OpenAI launched Dots, and a startup called Instinct recently raised $1 billion at a $10 billion valuation. But Eugenia Kuyda thinks the next generation of AI assistants needs to do more than book your restaurant reservations and find you hidden money in your Gmail.
Amulya Vishwanath, who spent seven years leading product marketing for NVIDIA’s robotics platforms, says robotics is currently in its “Lego era,” with the basic building blocks like actuators, robotic hands, software, and safety standards still being rebuilt.
The Equity crew was live at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026! Kirsten Korosec, Anthony Ha, and Sean O’Kane took over the Builders Stage Tuesday morning to tackle a growing challenge for the AI industry: what happens when AI agents go off-script, and who’s responsible for keeping them in check?
Amazon says it will stop using NDAs when negotiating data center deals with local governments, following a similar move from Microsoft earlier this year. Secrecy has fueled community backlash against AI infrastructure, with opposition leading to hundreds of proposed and enacted moratoriums from New York to San Francisco. Meanwhile, a wave of startups is betting that consumers will hand AI agents access to their inboxes, files, and credit cards — if they can get websites to let them in.
Tristan Walker and Brynn Putnam both built and sold major consumer companies. Now, they’re building products designed to bring people together.