Amazon's Steve Schmidt on why your AI agents are your biggest security risk (Live at HumanX)

Equity

TechCrunch

Business, News, Technology, Business News, Entrepreneurship

4.2 • 372 Ratings

🗓️ 13 May 2026

⏱️ 20 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

AI may be changing how companies build, but it's also changing how they get attacked, often by their own tools. Amazon Chief Security Officer Steve Schmidt has watched threat actors at every skill level get sharper, faster, and harder to contain. The risk he's most focused on, however, isn't coming from outside the firewall. On this episode of TechCrunch's Equity podcast, we're bringing you a conversation Rebecca Bellan had with Schmidt at the HumanX conference in San Francisco. The two dug into what AI is already doing to the threat landscape and how Amazon is rethinking identity, containment, and human oversight to keep agents in check. Listen to the full episode to hear about: Why shadow AI inside your own organization may be a bigger liability than the hackers trying to get in What agentic identity means in practice, and how Amazon traces every agent action back to a human How startups with five people (and no CISO) can manage their AI security, and why containment is becoming the defining security challenge of the agentic era Subscribe to Equity on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. You also can follow Equity on X and Threads, at @EquityPod. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch's flagship podcast about the business of startups.
0:04.8	I'm Rebecca Boulon, and this is the episode where we bring on industry experts to help us explore a trend in the tech world and dive deep.
0:11.3	Today, we're bringing you a conversation I had on stage at Human X with Steve Schmidt, Chief Security Officer at Amazon.
0:18.8	Everyone at Human X was talking about how Anth anthropics mythos will affect cybersecurity, but
0:23.5	Steve and I actually talked about what AI is already doing to the threat landscape.
0:28.3	We broke down what happens when agents go rogue, why companies need to have a comprehensive
0:33.5	overview of what AI is being used in their firms and where, and how containment and
0:37.9	agentic identity are becoming the new front lines. Let's take a listen.
0:45.4	Hey, hello. Hello. So, Steve, you've spent time at the FBI and now you're leading security at one of the largest
0:58.6	companies on the planet.
1:00.6	In the last two years, what is the most real, not hyped, way that AI has changed the threat
1:07.1	landscape?
1:08.1	Sure.
1:09.1	So I think the thing that we're seeing in reality right now is that AI is allowing threat
1:14.3	actors to uplevel their game.
1:17.3	We've talked about this previously.
1:18.7	It's a situation where actors used to have sort of stratified sets of skills.
1:23.3	You get the sort of script kiddies at the, and you get the state actors at the top.
1:28.1	The interesting thing we're seeing now is that the people who have sort of the lower level
1:33.6	skills are becoming more effective at what they do because of AI. It really prompts them
1:39.2	effectively to change the tooling they're using, the approaches, the things they're going after,
1:44.0	it leads them in the right place, etc.
	...

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