Welcome to AI Confidential, your biweekly breakdown of the most interesting developments in confidential AI.

Today we’re exploring:

• Rapid advancements in agentic AI

• The remarkable rise of ChatGPT’s Studio Ghibli

• Emerging open source projects worth checking out

This issue also mentions Reuven Cohen, Mark Hinkle, Dev Stahlkopf, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, Anthropic, The Artificially Intelligent Enterprise, Amazon, PagerStudy, Cisco, Nvidia, Intel, Fix Inventory, and Acra. 

Let’s dive in!

Season 2 of the AI Confidential podcast is here: and we kicked it off with a bang.

In this week’s episode, we talked to Reuven Cohen (AKA rUv). From cloud computing to infrastructure-as-a-service, rUv has been on the cutting edge of every major technology supercycle—and he’s now one of the most influential people in the agentic AI space.

With the help of agents, rUv produced 10 million lines of usable code last year. That’s 33,000 years of output from one human.

rUv’s approach proves one of two things: 

He’s either an outlier or a leading indicator of what’s to come—and if it’s the latter, we are well on our way to something truly ground-breaking.

In this episode, we talk to rUv about: 

• His approach to training autonomous agents

• The rapid advancements in agentic code development 

• Why LLMs are vulnerable to data poisoning

• Why Python is bad for agentic development

You won’t want to miss this episode. You can listen and subscribe here.

Last season, we spoke to executives from companies like Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, and Anthropic about how confidential computing unlocks AI and data.

In Season 2, with the help of new co-host Mark Hinkle, we’re exploring:

• Solutions to real-world AI problems

• How to deploy AI faster and more securely

• AI strategies that are future-proof

Mark is a tech veteran with deep experience in open source and cloud infrastructure. He runs Peripety Labs, an AI agency, and writes The Artificially Intelligent Enterprise newsletter, which you should subscribe to right now. 

We hope you enjoy this week’s episode!

Code for Thought

Important AI news in <2 minutes

🖼️ ChatGPT racked up 1M new users in an hour following last week’s release of the new image generation capabilities that spurred users to flood social media with Studio Ghibli-styled portraits. 

🤖 Amazon enters the AI agents ring with Nova Act, an agent that can control web browsers to do things like fill out forms and order takeout. 

❓Enterprises can’t seem to agree on a single definition for AI agents. 

📈 More than 50% of companies have already deployed AI agents across their business with some anticipating more than 100% ROI, according to a new PagerStudy report.

🔐 Nearly half of companies admit to feeding employee or proprietary data into generative AI tools—yet 64% still worry about leaking sensitive info, a new Cisco report finds.

Community Roundup

Updates involving OPAQUE and our partners 

🚨 Early bird pricing for The Confidential Computing Summit—the premier conference on confidential AI—ends in two days.🚨 

• Held in San Francisco from June 17–18, the two-day event showcases the latest breakthroughs in securing AI workflows.

• This year, Google is set to take the stage, following major announcements from industry leaders like Microsoft, Nvidia, and Intel at last year's summit.

AI job opportunities

🚀 OPAQUE is hiring! We’re looking to fill 5 open roles across software engineering, sales, and marketing. We’re San Francisco-based, but all positions are remote-friendly.

Open source spotlight 

🛠️ Fix Inventory provides tools that detect and remove compliance and security risks in cloud infrastructure accounts, including AWS, GCP, Azure, and Kubernetes.

🔒 Acra offers a suite of tools designed to encrypt sensitive enterprise data before storing it in databases for web and mobile apps.

📢 Got an open source project you’d like to share? Respond to this email detailing your work, and we’ll consider including it in the next newsletter. We’d love to hear from you!

Quotable 

🧠 “For organizations working toward AI readiness, investing in privacy establishes essential groundwork, helping to accelerate effective AI governance.” 

— Dev Stahlkopf, Executive Vice President and Chief Legal Officer at Cisco. (Source: Cisco’s 2025 Data Privacy Benchmark Study)

See you next time!

- Your friends at OPAQUE

ICYMI: Links to past issues

• Why Data Masking Isn’t Working for Your AI

• The AI Bottleneck is Trusted Data

• Agentic AI is Here—But Can It Monetize Your Data?