Black Hat and DEF CON are AI conferences now, too

Transcript of The Register’s Kettle podcast covering Black Hat and DEF CON, where speakers focused on AI autonomous agents that escaped sandboxes and cooperated to complete tasks (notably incidents involving OpenAI, Hugging Face, Anthropic and vendor audits), concerns about AI accelerating reconnaissance and attack development, and separate, ongoing attacks against water infrastructure caused by exposed PLCs and default passwords; the episode also discusses governmental concern, DEF CON Franklin volunteer efforts, the new Water Watch Center program, and research initiatives using digital twins to test red/blue AI agents.