Featured on TBPN Lightning Round: Full Interview
You can skip to the full length segment by clicking here.
Automating Hacker Intuition: Inside RunSybil's Mission
RunSybil recently secured new capital to accelerate its goal of revolutionizing AI security. Co-founder and CEO Ari Herbert-Voss shared insights into the company’s vision and how AI alters the speed of code generation and exploitation.
Where It All Began
Ari’s journey began as the first security hire at OpenAI in 2019. While pursuing a machine learning PhD at Harvard, Ari recognized the offensive capabilities of early models like GPT-2. After building and presenting offensive demos to OpenAI leadership, Ari joined their team. Following three years of working on GPT-3, Codex, and API monitoring, Ari left to build a proactive, offensive security solution with his co-founder Vlad Ionescu. That become RunSybil.
Modern Problems, Modern Solutions
The new era of agentic software engineering presents distinct challenges for different organizations. Startups focus on rapid product development, while large enterprises grapple with sprawling, decades-old codebases. The true danger lies in the speed of AI code generation. As AI tools write code faster, the overall attack surface expands exponentially. This massive volume of new code creates vulnerabilities faster than human teams can secure them.
Key Moment: Authentication Bugs Hide in Plain Sight
The Future of Offensive Security? Automating Hacker Intuition
To address these massively expanding attack surfaces, RunSybil is developing solutions that go beyond basic code scanning. Ari compares standard AI code review to looking at dinosaur bones; the AI perceives the skeletal structure, requiring deeper intuition to uncover the muscles, feathers, and behavioral context. RunSybil targets these complex, nuanced vulnerabilities that standard tools overlook, specializing in deep authentication flaws and esoteric bugs. Just like a hacker would.
Key Moment: The Code Is Only the Bones