18: Models, Malware & Mayhem with Varun Badwhar

In this episode of Robots and Red Tape, our host Nick Schutt sits down with Varun Badhwar, Founder & CEO of Endor Labs, to unpack the security implications of the AI coding explosion.

Varun shares why this wave feels fundamentally different from the cloud shift he saw with RedLock/Prisma Cloud, how AI agents have turned 20–30 million developers into 200–300 million potential coders, and why we’re now generating 100x–1000x more code—much of it carrying the same insecure patterns the models learned from open source.

They dig into:

-The shift from code generation as the bottleneck to verification, quality, scale, and security

Why even frontier models produce only ~20% secure code (per Endor’s CMU/Columbia benchmark)

-Democratization of cyber warfare: attacks that once took years now take hours

-Open-source realities—80% of software, average 77 transitive dependencies, low maintainer response rates, and intentional malware campaigns

-How Endor Labs embeds security oversight directly into agentic workflows so fixes happen at assembly time, not after shipping

-Practical paths for large enterprises sitting on millions of findings to burn down real risk without bankrupting themselves on pure-AI token costs

Podcast: Robots and Red Tape | Host: Nick Schutt | Channel: @RobotsandRedTapeAI

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