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JM Joshua Monrad On The Cognitive Revolution" | AI Builders, Researchers, and Live Player Analysis

“If the threat model you have in the very near term, next couple of years, is a social engineering threat model, then yes, the playbook we've been building out on know-your-customer, on monitoring the use of different services, is going to be extremely relevant. Eventually KYC will become KYA, and it's sort of know your agent.”

The Cognitive Revolution" | AI Builders, Researchers, and Live Player Analysis · AI Research & Frontier Labs · November 2026

“If the threat model you have in the very near term, next couple of years, is a social engineering threat model, then yes, the playbook we've been building out on know-your-customer, on monitoring the use of different services, is going to be extremely relevant. Eventually KYC will become KYA, and it's sort of know your agent.” — Joshua Monrad, The Cognitive Revolution" | AI Builders, Researchers, and Live Player Analysis

Context

Asked where a swarm of rogue AI agents trying to get a pathogen built would most likely be stopped, the biosecurity researcher says the customer-screening playbook built for DNA providers and cloud labs will have to extend to AI agents.

Transcript

The Cognitive Revolution" | AI Builders, Researchers, and Live Player Analysis Around 45:04 into the episode
Erik Torenberg

I've come close a time or

Nathan Labenz

two. Or would it be at the level of synthesis? And this is maybe a good place to tell us more about some of the work you've been very directly involved in on the synthesis controls.

Joshua Monrad

Yeah. Yeah. Well, I'm very happy to talk about the controls part because I think that's going to be relevant. Certainly, it's going to be relevant in this, if we're in this sort of Kentower phase where you're worried about a human that is maybe being instructed by an AI, blackmailed, or coerced. Then I think the playbook that we have around know your customer, eventually that'll have to be, you know, KYC will become KYA and it's sort of know your agent. But if the threat model you have in the very near term, next couple of years, is a social engineering threat model, then yes, I think the playbook we've been building out on KYC, on monitoring the use of different services, is going to be extremely relevant. So yeah, let's talk about it.

Nathan Labenz

You know, imagine swarm of agents. What are they going to run into as they pursue this nefarious goal?

Joshua Monrad

Yeah. Okay. So we're imagining that we've failed at the level of constraining the model with classifiers or keeping certain training data out of its hands at the training stage. And we're now at the point where you're trying to take at digital design. You've successfully designed some nasty virus…

Nathan Labenz

So tell me more. For one thing, I was interested to see that you had, in the process of zeroing in on a couple of these choke points, evaluated like hundreds of different possible choke points. So I'm interested in what makes these so natural. I'd be interested in other things you learned from…

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.

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