Hello from Lake Arrowhead 👋 — fresh off a visit to Cisco Live in San Diego, where I caught up with Vijoy Pandey (you’ll hear from him soon on the AI Confidential podcast).
Cisco hosted a genuinely impressive showcase of their quantum networking advancements, including a chip producing 200 million entangled photon pairs per second. Wild.
They even had VR walkthroughs of the lab and the actual hardware on site. But what stood out most wasn’t quantum—it was how
Cisco is rethinking security for the agentic web. They’re not treating trust like an afterthought. Their updates to hybrid mesh firewall and zero trust network access aren’t just feature upgrades—they’re foundational. Programmable, policy-aware, and hardware-backed. Pushed all the way to the edge. In a world of autonomous AI agents, you can’t bolt on trust after the fact.
Cisco’s securing the roads. At OPAQUE, we’re focused on securing the drivers—ensuring AI agents behave within guardrails, with verifiable guarantees. I’ll link to Brianna Monsanto’s write-up in the comments—she asked for my take, and it’s worth a read. 👇 https://www.itbrew.com/stories/2025/06/12/cisco-wants-to-be-the-picks-and-shovels-company-of-the-gold-agentic-ai-rush
Also, Papi Menon from Vijoy’s team will be speaking next week at The Confidential Computing Summit (June 16-18 in San Francisco) and we hope to see you there.
Here’s the link to our Summit: http://www.ConfidentialComputingSummit.com, featuring an impressive group of speakers and topics primarily focused on next-gen AI infrastructure.
Aaron Fulkerson 