The Dark Knight of Game Economies on AI, Curiosity, and Guardrails

Ward Spangenberg has spent his career finding the gaps: mapping trout DNA with a homemade database in college, dismantling a game economy's black market so thoroughly that players nicknamed him the Dark Knight, and helping build the case for bug bounties at HackerOne. Now he's the founder of Behavry.ai, building in the category Gartner calls guardian agents.In this conversation, Ward and Taylor dig into why security spends its money explaining last night instead of preventing tomorrow, what purple teaming should have become, how to hire engineers with the play instinct, and why AI won't take over but ungoverned agents absolutely will hurt you. Ward breaks down the four things real AI agent governance requires: no self-attestation, real-time review of every action, human-in-the-loop escalation instead of binary yes/no decisions, and tamper-evident audit trails that regulators are about to start asking for.Whether you're a practitioner, a founder, an investor, or just AI-curious, this one is full of stories you'll retell.What's acutely broken in security: an industry built on hindsightThinking like an attacker: every door, every window, one unlockedPurple teaming as a quarterly exercise when you don't have the budgetHiring for curiosity: role-play interviews and the "what do you play with at home" questionWhy AI won't take over (and why it doesn't write perfect code)The junior analyst who becomes a level two with the right AI toolingWard's origin stories: trout genetics, game fraud, and the Dark KnightWhy you can't kill the black market: the bug bounty lessonBehavry.ai and the guardian agents category: proxy, policy, attestationThe compliance wave: EU AI rules, Wyoming, and the SECWard Spangenberg is a longtime security practitioner and leader whose career spans companies like Uber, HackerOne, and a Silicon Valley gaming company, plus years presenting to lawyers and law enforcement investigators. He is the founder of Behavry.ai, an AI governance platform that adds policy, human-in-the-loop controls, and independent, tamper-evident attestation to any AI agent, model, or provider. He is also a rugby coach, a gym rat, and the kind of person who stuck a paper clip in an outlet as a kid and grew up to build guardrails for a living.Behavry.aiWard on LinkedIn: Ward SpangenbergWard on Twitter/X: @wardspan