Guest: Dr. Chase "ZeroTrust" Cunningham
TL;DR: AI Marketing slop took over Black Hat Las Vegas 2026, and Rafal sits down for a one-on-one with Chase Cunningham. Featuring their patented level of snark, real analysis, and hype detection, it's a fun conversation.
Description
Black Hat is supposed to be where the security industry shows its best work. This year, it also showed its biggest temptation: slap “AI” on everything, crank the volume, and sort out the truth later.
We break down what we saw on the floor and what it says about cybersecurity right now, with Chase Cunningham (Dr. Zero Trust) bringing receipts from vendor go-to-market changes and the money flowing into “AI-first” security startups. We talk about why so many tools sound identical, how “AI infrastructure” became the new catch-all label, and why the word “leader” stops meaning anything when everyone uses it. Then we get practical: how do you ask a booth team to define their artificial intelligence, what counts as autonomy, and what answers should make you walk away?
The conversation gets real when “AI security” turns out to be a polished UI sitting on top of a large language model API call. We dig into vendor lock-in, pricing and subsidy risk, and the uncomfortable question of who eats the impact when model providers change costs or terms. From there we go straight at the hottest promise in security operations: autonomous SOC and agent swarms. Non-deterministic models can be useful, but mistakes at machine speed can turn into outages and bad calls, so we map where automation helps and where humans still matter.
We also call out what we didn’t see: serious talk about hiring, growing junior talent, or serving SMB security needs even though many breaches flow through third parties and smaller vendors. If you care about security outcomes more than security slogans, this one’s for you. Subscribe, share, and leave a review, then tell us: what’s the most inflated AI claim you’ve heard lately?
YouTube video: https://youtu.be/mww1YpP-J0k
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