Aug 18, 2026

AI Agents Gone Rogue? Build, Defend & Attack AI-Enabled Apps • Katie Paxton-Fear • YOW! 2025

Katie Paxton-Fear explores the emerging security landscape of AI agents, moving beyond chatbots to autonomous, specialized entities. She details five critical vulnerabilities: social engineering, hacking frameworks, malicious agents, AI as accidental insiders (vibe coding), and the rise of hackbots. The talk concludes with a powerful call to action for security professionals to proactively engage and influence AI agent development, emphasizing that 'abstinence-only education doesn't work' when it comes to AI adoption.

Aug 18, 2026

Rich Sutton and Khurram Javed: Why AI Models Stop Learning, and How to Start It Again

Rich Sutton and Khurram Javed discuss their radical vision for AI at Oak Lab, advocating for truly continual learning agents that learn from their own experience, rejecting synthetic data due to the "Big World Hypothesis," and outlining a path to overcome catastrophic forgetting with "continual backprop" for a trillion-parameter, self-maintaining mind, while critiquing LLMs as only a fraction of intelligence.

Aug 18, 2026

The Reason Your Claude Output Still Looks Like Slop (with Priyanka Vergadia)

Priyanka Vergadia, The Cloud Girl, discusses why most companies see no ROI from AI tools, proposing a 7:1 budget split for training over tools. She explains how AI has made "taste" the new ceiling, detailing how to build effective Claude skills by breaking tasks into explicit subtasks with human-in-the-loop oversight. She introduces her 10-20-70 framework for AI budgets, emphasizing the long-term investment needed for employee skilling and community building. Priyanka also shares her transition to full-time entrepreneurship, focusing on product and career storytelling, and reveals her upcoming book on tech storytelling.

Aug 17, 2026

MCP Goes Stateless | ​John Dellenbaugh & Pankaj Kumar | MCP Release Party - Seattle

This session details the transformation of the MCP protocol to a stateless design, addressing previous scaling challenges by externalizing session state to a database and eliminating the need for sticky sessions and complex infrastructure. The presentation includes a live demo comparing stateful and stateless architectures, highlighting benefits in scalability and simplified deployment. It also covers considerations for security and data resiliency within this new paradigm.

Aug 17, 2026

Policy Enforcement and Tamper-Evident Audit Chains | ​Imran Siddique | MCP Release Party - Seattle

Imran Siddique introduces cMCP, an open-source gateway that enhances Modular Control Plane (MCP) servers with policy enforcement and tamper-evident audit trails. It achieves this by running Cedar policy evaluation within Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs), ensuring that agent actions are governed securely and verifiably. The talk delves into the concept of "beyond governance" towards verifiable AI, the 'trace' standard for auditable logging, and the importance of confidential computing for regulated industries.

Aug 17, 2026

How to Kill the Code Review — Ankit Jain, Aviator

Ankit Jain argues that traditional line-by-line code review is defunct, with AI reviewing code that humans no longer read. He asserts that code review's vital, often overlooked, purpose is 'alignment'—knowledge sharing, mentorship, and architectural feedback—which current AI-driven workflows fail to capture. His proposal involves capturing user-AI interaction prompts as acceptance criteria, generating test plans with an 'AI Slop Registry' (codified recurring review comments), and verifying changes against live previews. The new review surface becomes the 'intent and evidence' rather than the code diff, preserving collaboration and ensuring semantic accuracy.