Techstrong Gang

This episode is built for listeners riding out a commute or working with one ear on the audio. You'll hear how a sitting president and a former president ended up publicly split on where AI regulation belongs, what California just forced onto the table while Washington stalls, and what a new federal antitrust lawsuit is actually alleging about how the biggest AI companies coordinate. Then the panel switches lanes to the compute sto...

This week's Techstrong panel decodes three stories driving enterprise IT decisions right now. First, Splunk's aggressive move to unify observability, security, and agentic-AI operations — and how Cisco just plugged the gap in Splunk's on-prem story with the same AI tools going to enterprise IT stacks.

Then, the collision between AI's data-center energy footprint and Congress: Sen. Martin Heinrich has a bill that would keep ho...

Listen to Alan Shimel, Jon Swartz, Jaime Hampton and Jiewen Wang discuss three enterprise technology stories from September 17, 2026.

Microsoft's AI chief warns Anthropic's push toward “conscious” AI threatens human control while OpenAI publishes six new model-misalignment incidents and a tracking plan.

Salesforce's Dreamforce turns into an AI arms race with AIforce, a Salesforce + NVIDIA Koa reasoning model, an Enterpr...

Can AI companies oversee their own models? Who should stop fraudulent music streams? And how much privacy protection can a surveillance vendor's own rules provide?

This September 16 edition of Techstrong Gang features Alan Shimel, Teri Robinson, Elizabeth (Liz) Safran and Andi Mann. The source stories concern OpenAI, Anthropic and Google DeepMind's safety-body talks, music distributors' responsibility for rights and fraud checks, a...

Can better chips ease AI’s power demands—and who pays when AI spending outruns the plan?

Alan Shimel hosts Kate Scarcella, Sid Nag and David Nicholson for Techstrong Gang’s September 15, 2026 discussion of AI infrastructure, enterprise budgets and outsourced IT services.

First, Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan argues that future silicon designs could improve AI power efficiency and hardware security. Those are forward-looking...

What does responsible AI restraint look like when rivals must cooperate? (techstrong.ai — https://techstrong.ai/agentic-ai/silicon-valleys-top-ai-rivals-unite-in-unprecedented-call-to-pump-brakes-on-frontier-model-development/) How much freedom do VMware customers retain when licensing and migration tools change? (techstrong.it — https://techstrong.it/featured/broadcom-restricts-vmware-vddk-access-complicating-customer-...

This episode connects resilience lessons from September 11 with current questions about AI safety, misuse, and accountable controls. The panel also considers Germany’s proposed Cyberdome and the changing relationship between cyber defense, drones, and public oversight.

Host: Mike Vizard. Guests: Jon Swartz, Jack Poller, Tracy Ragan and Jeff Reich.

Read more: 25 Years on From 9/11 Twenty-Five Years After 9/11: What Have We Lea...

Congress is moving fast on AI agents — a new bipartisan House bill targets rogue AI agents in the wake of high-profile OpenAI breaches, and a proposed AI superintelligence ban would carry prison terms and corporate shutdowns for violators. Organizations are already struggling to detect and contain agents operating out of scope. Also on the show: whether copyright law loses to national security claims, and New York City’...

OpenAI drops Astra, its first model to cross the “critical” cybersecurity risk threshold — and the company is already calling this the start of the AGI era, even as a $1B Daybreak initiative aims to protect frontline defenders and questions swirl about how tightly watchdogs are being kept on a short leash after OpenAI’s bots went rogue. Then: a mystery outage takes down ChatGPT, Claude, and Grok at the same ...

JFrog’s CEO drops a bombshell claim: source code no longer matters as AI takes over engineering workflows — and JFrog is racing to secure agentic pipelines instead. CrowdStrike pushes AI-agent security to the endpoint, unveiling a new platform alongside its Project QuiltWorks AI initiative and a fresh approach to securing software supply chains. Plus, Broadcom unveils an AI Factory built on VMware Cloud Foundation and s...

Apple hands the CEO reins to John Ternus in a $4.5 trillion transition as OpenAI and Anthropic drive Mac hardware into short supply. Anthropic slashes enterprise AI context-caching costs 75% with Claude Fable 5.1 and Mythos 5.1, while startup Guickly emerges from stealth to help enterprises control ballooning AI spend. Plus, Meta Glasses face a criminal complaint in Germany from a digital rights group.

Mike Vizard and Alan Shimel a...

This episode covers hardware’s resurgence — including a new hardware fund from software’s biggest champion and DoJ antitrust scrutiny of Andreessen Horowitz — plus quantum computing’s gap between market hype and working machines, anchored by IBM’s HRL Laboratories deal. The panel closes with New York’s overtake of San Francisco as the top North American tech hub.

Hosts: Mike Vizard, Alan S...

This episode covers Trump’s push for new semiconductor tariffs and the alarm it’s raising over U.S. AI growth, OpenAI and Anthropic’s warning that the window to defend against AI-driven cyberattacks is closing, and how autonomous killer drones — including Ukraine’s Delta battlefield AI — are becoming cheap and real.

Hosted by Mike Vizard, with guests Jack Poller, Jon Swartz, Tracy Ragan, Jeff Re...

NVIDIA is reportedly acquiring Hugging Face for $12.9 billion, Bill Gates is warning world leaders that AI-driven job disruption is coming faster than they’re prepared for, and Broadcom is lining up as much as $100 billion in financing for its AI chip build-out — raising the question of who’s really paying for the AI boom.

Hosted by Mike Vizard and Alan Shimel, with guests Jon Swartz, Anne Ahola Ward, and Tom Hol...