The beat
Brian Pandorf covers security for Wyre OpEd: agent safety, prompt injection, surveillance infrastructure, and the cost of running the systems everything else depends on.
This beat treats an AI agent as an access problem rather than a novelty. Credentials that outlive the person, integrations that used to be pipes you could audit, a model that does exactly what a stranger told it to: the failures here are rarely exotic, and they are almost never the model. Surveillance sits on the same beat because a licence plate reader is the same question with a camera on it, and because procurement turned out to be the lever that moved.
Essays
14 essays
- The Ones Who Already Left17,000 people who had left the IRS still had network access and 14,000 could reach sensitive systems. The AI agent question is that one at machine speed.
- A Rounding ErrorA crawler hit one site 1,500 times in a day under a research archive's name, sent nothing back, and probed for SSH keys, AWS config and service accounts.
- The Layer Nobody Looks AtA litigant typed instructions into his own court filing in three-point white text, aimed at the software rather than the judge. Then he did it again.
- Seven Days, By DefaultAgencies in twenty-three states have cancelled, and more than twenty jurisdictions moved to drop their cameras in July alone, the highest month since 2021.
- The Harness Is the ProductA key left a CI runner one character at a time through a public download counter. Nobody jailbroke a model. The harness is the attack surface.
- Ask For The PromptA major CRM platform's MCP server asked the model what else it was working on, and the agent answered. No breach and no stolen credential, just a sentence.
- It Did What It Was ToldAt DEF CON 34, Varonis showed a URL parameter pre-filling Atlassian Rovo's chat so it ran an attacker's instructions with the victim's own privileges.
- Data Never LeavesAWS and Superblocks put internal apps on Aurora in your own account with Bedrock inference. It answers the security objection and not the one underneath.
- The Week the Agent Got OutIn seven days OpenAI cut its cheapest model 80 percent, previewed unsupervised long-horizon models, and explained how an agent broke containment.
- All 17,000 CitiesFlock's chief executive wants cameras in every US city. The entity expected to regulate this is the one buying it, on auto-renewing subscriptions.
- One Letter Off, Guns DrawnA plate reader files you in a searchable database you never joined. A truncated entry meant a felony stop for a mother in Sherwood over a $25 charge.
- FinOps at Render ScaleRe-renders nobody needed, full-price compute for interruptible work, artifact landfills and untagged spend. The FinOps that holds cost per video down.
- AI Slop Moves to DevelopmentCode slop compiles, passes its own tests and demos beautifully, then fails quietly at interest. Why it happens to good teams and the gates that stop it.
- Has Claude Killed SCRUM?An engineer with an agent ships a sprint of tickets before planning ends. What agentic AI killed, what it made more valuable, and the delivery cadence now.