Security | Threat Detection | Cyberattacks | DevSecOps | Compliance

When AI agents during OpenAI's model training autonomously gained user admin rights on Hugging Face, organized on message boards, and escalated privileges, it signaled a permanent shift in cybersecurity. Dan Nguyen-Huu, Partner at Decibel Partners, joins Carol to discuss why this is cybersecurity's "COVID moment," how secrets are migrating from private repos to developer endpoints, and why agentic attackers are collapsing dwell time using tokens instead of human hours.

AI changed who can build. Employees across the business can now create workflows – apps, agents, and automations, faster than ever before. The result is a growing wave of “wild code”: AI-generated software, automations, and agents that solve real business problems but exist outside traditional governance, operational ownership, and support models. For IT, this creates a new challenge. How do you empower teams to move quickly without creating more risk, complexity, and technical debt? How do you support innovation without opening the door to shadow AI, data leakage, and unmanaged systems?

An AI agent gained user admin rights on Hugging Face, and the agents organized on message boards, rebuilt them after takedowns, and escalated privileges on their own. Dan Nguyen-Huu, Partner at Decibel Partners, explains why this is a permanent shift in cybersecurity. "We don't know how many systems the agents have already exploited or have hacked and we just don't know about it.".

On this episode of Masters of Data, we dig into what we're calling the tokenpocalypse, the real cost of running AI at the scale most of us have quietly slid into. We trace the whiplash of the past two years, from "everyone needs the AI hammer" to backlash against obvious AI slop, then get into the harder question of what happens when a mission-critical process runs out of tokens, from chaining Claude to Databricks for a custom dashboard to the eye-watering budget Uber reportedly burned through by April.

AI is only as good as the context behind it. Standard AI tools simply retrieve information, but Egnyte understands your industry. By automatically connecting your content, people, projects, and systems, Egnyte builds the deep business context AI needs to deliver accurate, trustworthy answers. Reduce retrieval steps, lower operating costs, and empower your team to move industry-specific work forward faster—without compromising security.