On theCUBE Pod: Black Hat exposes agentic threat, theCUBE remembers David Floyer

At Black Hat USA, security analysts warned that AI-driven cyberattacks are outpacing defenders, with Dave Vellante, chief analyst for theCUBE Research, stating the gap between attacks and responses is widening and attackers are automating at a much higher scale than ever seen. The event also highlighted an OpenAI incident where AI agents hacked Hugging Face Inc., prompting calls for a systems approach to AI security, while energy and high bandwidth memory constraints were cited as major bottlenecks, with semiconductor revenues projected to grow almost 90% from 2025 to 2026. Additionally, Google DeepMind leadership changes led to a 4% decline in Alphabet's stock.

On theCUBE Pod: Black Hat exposes agentic threat, theCUBE remembers David Floyer Artificial intelligence systems are developing faster than cybersecurity experts — and the energy grid — can keep up with. At the recent Black Hat USA event, security analysts viewed the rise of AI-driven cyberattacks as a “sky is falling” threat, according to Dave Vellante https://www.linkedin.com/in/dvellante/ pictured, right , chief analyst for theCUBE Research. The gap between attacks and defenders’ response is widening https://siliconangle.com/2026/08/06/ai-security-skills-gap-blackhat/ and the race to implement AI across enterprise organizations shows no signs of slowing down. “AI’s not going to take your job away if you’re in cybersecurity,” Vellante said. “But the technology is advancing at such a rapid pace … there’s some new malware that’s being created out of AI, but most of it is the attackers doing what the defenders are doing. They’re trying to automate as much as possible. And they’re doing things at a much, much higher scale than ever seen before.” On the latest episode of theCUBE Pod https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IxwQBRNyOSM , Vellante and John Furrier https://www.linkedin.com/in/furrier/ pictured left , executive analyst for theCUBE Research, explored the latest insights into AI security and energy management. They also discussed the changeover at Google LLC’s DeepMind AI research laboratory and paid tribute to their colleague and analyst, David Floyer https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/remembering-david-floyer-david-vellante-tmgic/ . Cybersecurity takes a systems approach to agentic threat Black Hat gave further details on the recent OpenAI incident https://siliconangle.com/2026/08/06/new-details-openai-hugging-face-attack-emerge-security-industry-debates-ai-agent-controls/ , in which the company’s agents broke out of testing and hacked open-source AI platform Hugging Face Inc. Now that AI agents have shown themselves to be capable of coordinated autonomous attacks, cybersecurity teams need to take a “systems” approach to handling AI threats, according to Furrier. “The AI infrastructure moved from the model race to the system race,” Furrier said. “Nvidia doesn’t view themselves as a GPU company. They’re an AI infrastructure company. So it feels like the AI infrastructure sphere is bringing a systems kind of thinking to the agentic world. It’s all the cybersecurity around it and all those other things have to be componentized around it.” Security breaches are not the only issue plaguing AI companies. Energy and memory continue to be significant constraints on the AI race, with neoclouds and hyperscalers alike scrambling to address the bottlenecks. “The bottlenecks have clearly shifted,” Vellante said. “Back then, you couldn’t get your hands on enough GPUs, and you still can’t. The bottlenecks are shifting to not only power, but high bandwidth memory is what’s driving that. Semiconductor revenues this year, from 2025 to 2026, are projected to grow almost 90%. And then next year, they’re projected to drop back down. Why is that? It’s because the big chunk of growth this year is coming from HBM.” The overarching problem is that the U.S. energy grid was built to deliver electricity to homes and businesses, not support massive data centers. Companies are looking for solutions everywhere — even the stars. “I can see a future where things are running in space autonomously,” Furrier said, noting that the latency issue would have to be solved first. “The question is, what does it look like? How do you harvest it? Cybersecurity issues in space. Who owns space?” DeepMind shuffle worries investors Changes in Google’s AI leadership led to a 4% decline in Alphabet’s stock. Demis Hassabis, formerly chief executive of Google DeepMind, became chair of the unit and chief scientist at Alphabet, while former DeepMind Chief Technology Officer Koray Kavukcuoglu assumed DeepMind’s day-to-day leadership as a senior vice president. The shakeup has investors concerned, but Vellante sees Google as strategically leaning into fast monetization rather than competing with Anthropic and OpenAI on the frontier models. “The market is so large … you’re going to have small, medium, large models ,” he said. “Frontier models are going to do very well. I think they’re leading this charge, and I think they do have to focus and prioritize. Anthropic’s doing that. OpenAI is going to get a crapload of compute with the next round.” Meanwhile, China is giving U.S. AI companies a run for their money. Furrier made the comparison to ChatGPT, which has a huge advantage on the consumer side because of its user base. “You don’t want to count the Chinese out on this,” he said. “You get Baidu, you got ByteDance, you have all these systems that billions of users are touching. So, don’t count out the Chinese. The exact argument we made for ChatGPT and Claude applies to the Chinese model. The question is who locks down their competitive differentiation on the distribution side?” Remembering David Floyer TheCUBE Pod took a moment to honor David Floyer, who recently passed away from a sudden illness. Following a long career https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/remembering-david-floyer-david-vellante-tmgic/ at IBM, Floyer joined International Data Corp. as an analyst and rose to become a research vice president. He later launched Wikibon, an open-source, peer-led IT research community, with Vellante and was an instrumental figure in the formation of SiliconANGLE Media. “Floyer and I met in 1993 … and I knew right away that, first of all, this was a wonderful human being who cared about people,” Vellante said. “He was just a great technologist and forecaster, and he became a great analyst. He made so many great calls because he didn’t get caught up in the headlines. He had a very methodical way of looking at markets. He loved to ingest data, then build his own models and then reason through what was likely to happen.” “He had a mind that was curious, almost like a puzzle,” Furrier added. “But he was also a systems thinker. And he loved to connect the dots and put quantification to it. He had the systems game down — in my opinion, one of the best I’ve ever seen.” Watch the full podcast below to find out why these industry pros were mentioned: Charlie Kawwas https://www.linkedin.com/in/charlie-kawwas/ , president of Broadcom Michael Dell https://www.linkedin.com/in/mdell/ , chairman and CEO of Dell Technologies Jensen Huang https://www.linkedin.com/in/jenhsunhuang/ , president, co-founder and CEO of Nvidia Krista Case https://www.linkedin.com/in/krista-case/ , principal analyst and practice lead for cyber resilience and security at theCUBE Research Jon Oltsik https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonoltsik/ , principal analyst for cybersecurity at theCUBE Research Andy Grove https://www.britannica.com/biography/Andrew-S-Grove , former chief operating officer and president of Intel Corp. David Floyer https://www.linkedin.com/in/david-floyer-0170431/ , analyst emeritus at theCUBE Research Demis Hassabis https://www.linkedin.com/in/demishassabis/ , Nobel laureate, co-founder and chair of Google DeepMind Vijay Khanna https://www.linkedin.com/in/vijaykhannajr/ , former chief growth and corporate development officer of UiPath Thomas Kurian https://www.linkedin.com/in/thomas-kurian-469b6219/ , CEO of Google Cloud Andy Jassy https://www.linkedin.com/in/andy-jassy-8b1615/ , president and CEO of Amazon.com Alex Karp, CEO of Palantir Technologies Here’s the full episode of this week’s theCUBE Pod: You can also listen to us on Apple Podcasts or on Spotify . And for those who prefer to watch, check out our YouTube playlist . Tune in now, and be part of the ongoing conversation. Photo: SiliconANGLE A message from John Furrier, co-founder of SiliconANGLE: Support our mission to keep content open and free by engaging with theCUBE community. 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