The rapid evolution of AI makes reactive security obsolete. The new approach involves testing models in high-fidelity simulated environments to observe emergent behaviors from the outside. This allows mapping attack surfaces even without fully understanding the model's internal mechanics.

The current industry approach to AI safety, which focuses on censoring a model's "latent space," is flawed and ineffective. True safety work should reorient around preventing real-world, "meatspace" harm (e.g., data breaches). Security vulnerabilities should be fixed at the system level, not by trying to "lobotomize" the model itself.

Claiming a "99% success rate" for an AI guardrail is misleading. The number of potential attacks (i.e., prompts) is nearly infinite. For GPT-5, it's 'one followed by a million zeros.' Blocking 99% of a tested subset still leaves a virtually infinite number of effective attacks undiscovered.

Traditional AI security is reactive, trying to stop leaks after sensitive data has been processed. A streaming data architecture offers a proactive alternative. It acts as a gateway, filtering or masking sensitive information *before* it ever reaches the untrusted AI agent, preventing breaches at the infrastructure level.

The model combines insurance (financial protection), standards (best practices), and audits (verification). Insurers fund robust standards, while enterprises comply to get cheaper insurance. This market mechanism aligns incentives for both rapid AI adoption and robust security, treating them as mutually reinforcing rather than a trade-off.

This advanced safety method moves beyond black-box filtering by analyzing a model's internal activations at runtime. It identifies which sub-components are associated with undesirable outputs, allowing for intervention or modification of the model's behavior *during* the generation process, rather than just after the fact.

Instead of relying on flawed AI guardrails, focus on traditional security practices. This includes strict permissioning (ensuring an AI agent can't do more than necessary) and containerizing processes (like running AI-generated code in a sandbox) to limit potential damage from a compromised AI.

Current AI safety solutions primarily act as external filters, analyzing prompts and responses. This "black box" approach is ineffective against jailbreaks and adversarial attacks that manipulate the model's internal workings to generate malicious output from seemingly benign inputs, much like a building's gate security can't stop a resident from causing harm inside.

Most AI "defense in depth" systems fail because their layers are correlated, often using the same base model. A successful approach requires creating genuinely independent defensive components. Even if each layer is individually weak, their independence makes it combinatorially harder for an attacker to bypass them all.