An AI that watches your every click may be the future of work | E2314

**Alex Wilhelm** (0:00)
Hello, and welcome back to Twist. This is Alex, and right now, AI and cybersecurity are hot topics because the leading frontier models are increasingly capable of finding and exploiting software vulnerabilities. Precisely how to harden global software is an open question that we're all working on resolving. But there are startups working in the AI and cybersecurity domains that are not trying to build the next hacking tool. One startup, Fresh Out of Stealth, has a novel approach to securing human action inside of corporations using AI that could help prevent the breaches of tomorrow. So please join me in welcoming to the show, it's Brandon Dixon, the co-founder and CTO of INT. This Week in Startups is brought to you by YSecurity, the on-demand security team for startups. Need enterprise-grade security without hiring a $400,000 CISO? YSecurity gives you 40 plus expert engineers matched to exactly what you need by the hour with your first six hours completely free. Go to ysecurity.io/twist.
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Brandon, how are you doing?

**Brandon Dixon** (1:16)
I'm doing phenomenal. Trying to stay cool in this hot weather in Virginia right now.

**Alex Wilhelm** (1:21)
It's bad up here. I can't imagine how bad it is down in the sticky South. But before we get into anything important, I'm shocked that after all the mining we have done on Lord of the Rings, Arcana, INT was not taken yet. How is that possible given that we've already gone deep into the Silmarillion to find startup names?

**Brandon Dixon** (1:39)
I think it's just a happy coincidence. When we were building out the company brand and the name, we were thinking of Enterprise as our core customer that we're going after. Ent, security for the Enterprise, was the approach there. Then of course, being more technically inclined people, there was a little bit of a nod to the Lord of the Rings trees and the protection. As we were building out that brand, it was important to me at least. I don't like the hoodies and hacker depiction of the bad guys.
I like being outside. I like doing those sorts of things. I wanted to try and carry that through in the brand as well.

**Alex Wilhelm** (2:20)
Well, it works out well. It's very memorable. It was not hard to recall who I was talking to today. Now, let's dig into what you built because I don't think people are going to be as familiar with this tool. But to give people a quick summary from what I understand, you have built a on-device agent for endpoints, so laptops, phones, and so forth, that can essentially tell when someone's going to do something they shouldn't do or may be risky and then stop them. Now, tell me what I got wrong and break it down for me why we need this. I'm really curious.

**Brandon Dixon** (2:48)
No, that's effectively it.
When my co-founder and I formed Ent, the thesis to this was that we've largely given up prevention inside of security. We're very reactive, we wait for the bad thing to occur. We have the requisite information to troubleshoot, but it felt like we were just accepting that the adversary was going to compromise the infrastructure.
A lot of the breaches occur because people are well inclined trying to do their jobs, but they make a mistake. When we were looking at the current AI advances with some of these reasoning models and the ability to scale up understanding words and representing that in dimensional ways, we wanted to apply that directly to where people worked. We wanted to meet them in that moment, look at the work that was taking place, and then make an assessment as to whether or not they were going to violate corporate policy or do something they shouldn't, and effectively stop that from happening. Why do we need it now? Well, unfortunately, breaches still occur from humans. People click things. They want to do the job.
If they were otherwise security experts, we wouldn't be dealing with breaches. Everybody would do the right thing. But on top of that, we do have AI in the mix and it's a new technology and it just brings new risks. So we believe that having that level of reasoning and capability at the endpoints and important advancement in the future.

**Alex Wilhelm** (4:15)
I want to get to the endpoint point and talk about models and such in a second. But the idea that people are doing more thanks to AI really resonates with me because up until when I had, I mean, frankly, OpenClaw, Codex and Cloud Code, I was not messing around in PowerShell or CLI.