a16z Podcast: Aaron Levie, Martin Casado and Steven Sinofsky on AI Safety, Agents and Regulation

a16z · youtube · 2026-09-26

a16z podcast: Erik Torenberg hosts Box CEO Aaron Levie, a16z's Martin Casado and Steven Sinofsky on AI safety, security and regulation.

Core argument: today's regulatory debate is premature — we haven't defined the risks we're regulating; they draw on computing history (viruses, early internet, aviation, autos) where safety standards followed understanding of real failures.
Agents are different: tireless, massively scalable, able to probe systems in ways human employees never could — potentially demanding rethinked permissions, authentication, operating systems and the security stack itself.
Other topics: whether labs believe their own extinction rhetoric, nationalization debates, David Sacks vs government, 2028 as the AI election, cybersecurity's rejection of practical solutions, "the craziest covert channel ever seen", LLMs as decision engines vs chatbots, and the being-vs-tool mindset behind labs' blind spots.
Takeaway: AI's next breakthroughs may increasingly come from outside the frontier labs, in the software built around models.

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