AI is changing cybersecurity, accelerating vulnerability research and exploit development while raising new questions about reliability, risk, and guardrails. Daniel and Chris talk with Spencer McIntyre, Director of Exploit Development at VulnCheck, about how agents are being used to discover vulnerabilities, why many proof-of-concept exploits (POCs) fail to deliver, and how initial access intelligence helps security teams prioritize real threats. They also explore the limitations of AI-assisted exploitation, the challenges of AI guardrails for security researchers, and what these developments mean for the future of threat intelligence.
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Chris’s new book The Art of Swarming will be published soon, written to be the seminal foundational book for the fledgling swarming industry, defining the principles and architecture that enable autonomous agentic UxS swarms with emergent unified embodied intelligence.
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You've rewritten Sparkles' instructions five times, and it still misses details or confirms orders too early. Another prompt tweak is just another guess. You use Agent Optimizer in Microsoft Foundry to turn that guesswork into a measured improvement loop. Start with a representative evaluation dataset and clear success criteria, score the current agent, then let the optimizer generate and evaluate candidate instructions. Compare the results against your baseline, review exactly what changed, and check the strongest candidate on held-out cases before shipping a new agent version. By the end, you'll know how to improve your agent's configuration, not retrain its model, with evidence that the changes actually help.
0:00 - Fix Inconsistent Agent Responses
0:36 - Introducing Agent Optimization
1:07 - Create a New Optimization
1:41 - Configure the Optimization Approach
2:14 - Select Candidate and Evaluator Models
2:47 - Use Production Traces as Data
3:20 - Review Estimated Optimization Costs
3:54 - Run the Agent Optimizer
4:29 - Compare Baseline and Candidates
5:02 - Analyze Quality and Latency
5:35 - Review Evaluation Scores
6:08 - Inspect Passed and Failed Tests
6:40 - Find Sensitive Information Disclosures
7:14 - Improve Your Agent from Results
7:47 - Agent Optimizer Recap and Next Steps