The CISO Playbook for AI Agents | Datadog

The number one story on Bloomberg right now is that AI has gone wild. You seem remarkably calm.

The way I see it is, if it's not an AI model, it's gonna be somebody or something with actual malicious intent doing it. I do worry about what can the agents do, what tools can they call, what binaries can they pull, and also how do they get access to credentials. So if a code is meant to solve the bug, but it gets rewarded on that, but it doesn't care if it's actually doing something else

The tree is sick, so to make it healthy, it cuts it down.

Out of necessity, my team built a judge that evaluates the intent behind a piece of code. Like, is this thing meant to do harm or not? And we actually find quite a bit of malicious skills in all these marketplaces.

Engineers now, security is very much front of mind

for them. Developers have always cared about security. Their problem has been that the version of security that we want them to

do is just crappy. My thesis ten years ago was that security engineers have become real engineers, so maybe now is the time.

AI is changing the security landscape on both sides. Attackers have more capable tools, but security teams are also figuring out how to use those same capabilities to their advantage. In this episode, a 16 Joel De La Garza sits down with Datadog CISO Emilio Escobar to talk about what he's seeing as AI adoption spreads across the enterprise, including thousands of engineers working with coding agents. They discuss how AI changes assumptions around permissions, credentials, and software supply chains, why simply blocking new tools doesn't work, and how security teams can adapt without becoming t

Thank you so much for joining us. I know you're not here to see us. You're here to go to Black Hat, and it's good to catch up. It's been a really crazy week. So you are a CISO at a public company, tech company, one of the house of innovation, driven a lot of really cool technology out of it. And we've been talking to everyone about these models escaping, these models hacking. And I know you've been central to kind of the adoption of AI at Datadog, and would love to maybe talk a little bit about how are you thinking through the risks? How are you deploying this stuff? And I know you're very clo