The Pentagon’s CTO Explains the Anthropic Rift and Superintelligence Task Force

Akash Pasricha (0:13)

Welcome everyone to The Information's TITV. My name is Akash Pasricha. It is Monday, October 19th. Today on the show, we're going to speak with Palo Alto Networks CIO about how it is helping customers deal with the risk of rogue agents. We'll then talk with the CEO of Modal, the AI infrastructure company recently that tripled its valuation to more than $15 billion in less than six months. We'll also get a status update on the NeoCloud route and how CoreWeave is holding up.

To close out the show, we have an extended conversation with the Pentagon's Chief Technology Officer about their work with Anthropic. We're also going to hear from him about the new Super Intelligence Task Force and dealing with foreign AI risks. It's going to be a great show, so let's get right on into it.

Palo Alto Networks is expanding its cybersecurity platform to protect businesses from AI agents from going rogue accessing sensitive data. Joining us now is Palo Alto Networks CIO, Meerah Rajavel. Meerah, welcome to the show. It's great to have you here.

Meerah Rajavel (1:17)

Thank you, Akash. Thank you for having us on the show.

Akash Pasricha (1:19)

Tell us about this product that you're releasing this morning.

Meerah Rajavel (1:23)

Akash, we are releasing a product called XDR1.

XDR is Endpoint Security. If you think about traditional endpoint security, they focus on network cloud and the local infrastructure of what is getting executed. But today, the biggest thing is AI, and the AI agents, what it is doing. You go to any company, it's actually a great productivity. It's a great powerful tool when you give it to the employees for the reason of software engineering or for the reason of individual productivity, like having something that's their personal twin. However, all these AI agents pose a serious new risk.

When you give an agent an autonomy or agency for what I'm doing with my permission, then it has actually access to things that I have access to, not just on my laptop, but also it's beyond our endpoint, it is beyond the systems I'm having, simple things from the code basis to financial ledgers. When we are dealing with it, there are multiple different things that agents can get into vulnerability issues, like data poisoning, supply chain attacks, and prompt injection. You just feed these agents a malicious kill, that can put you in a place that's deadly for the company. The second thing is, as a CIO, I care about the full visibility, but most of us, the AI agents, are today a blind spot because the traditional endpoint security gives you visibility of what's coming in. It doesn't say what exactly is happening. The analogy I've used it, XDR is like you have an X-ray scanner, it scans through, but if you wanted to know every single thing in that box, how it is getting used, you don't have that visibility. That's where the agent endpoint security comes into picture.

We spotted this risk because we are a company of 14,000 engineers, and as a CIO, my job is to really enable innovation, not hold them back. When we started seeing the power of AI in software engineering, we spotted this as a significant risk, and this is also a supply chain risk for our customers we didn't want to take. We are scanning the market to see what's going on, and when core security was even in the stealth mode, we spotted them. In fact, we literally brought them in, and we became the first customer of implementing them to say, okay, we really need to get this enabled before we let our engineers touch the tool to go and do the software engineering. Right. Today, yeah, go ahead.

Akash Pasricha (4:05)

Let me jump in here because I think you have an interesting perspective here on this being the CIO of a company that effectively is advising other CIOs on their own their own stack here.

You know, the issue around agents and security is, it's interesting because on one hand, we have these coding agents that help us write code. And I saw that Bank of America came out and said that they're hiring a thousand contractors now to help them deal with the vulnerabilities that Methos found in their own code. And you know, this is additional headcount that they have to bring on. And the question I have for you is, is the problem here that the coding agents and the code that Cloud Code and Codex create, is the problem that they are creating vulnerabilities in companies' own stacks and in their architecture because maybe it's just, it's a little bit quick and dirty and it's not the most secure code. Or is the problem more that the code is, it can be attacked from agents that can be used by malicious actors and stuff like that? Which of these two risks is more prevalent right now, from your view?