The Control Layer with Amer Altaf

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ ABOUT THIS EPISODE ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ Every AI agent your organisation deploys carries a values rulebook that somebody wrote. Usually a handful of researchers, at a Bay Area frontier lab. That is not a governance decision your board consciously made — it is the default your vendors chose for you. Dr Craig A. Kaplan — PhD with Nobel laureate Herbert A. Simon, foun...

Most companies are certain the EU AI Act is somebody else’s problem. They are wrong — and the vendor contract they are relying on will not save them. On 2 August 2026 the EU AI Act becomes enforceable across Europe, and a few weeks out, Brussels moved the headline deadline to 2027 and 2028. The whole market exhaled. In this episode, Amer Altaf sits down with Antonina Burlachenko , Head of Regulato...

Automating the Work, or the Workers? Vanta shipped a suite of AI agents it calls "24/7 GRC engineers" — evidence collection, risk analysis, vendor assessments, remediation guidance, all handled by machines. So what's left for the humans? Amer Altaf talks to Khush Kashyap, Senior Director of GRC at Vanta, about what agentic compliance actually means for practitioners — what it costs, what it change...

On 22 April 2026, the House Foreign Affairs Committee advanced by a substantial bipartisan margin a bill that gives the Netherlands 150 days to match American export controls on semiconductor equipment — or lose access to the American intellectual property inside every lithography machine ASML has ever built. This is the third instalment of the Four Chokepoints series — a 50-minute solo episode on...

You cannot procure sovereignty on imported metal. That's the argument at the centre of this episode — Part 2 of the Four Chokepoints series. Aluminium smelters in the Gulf are offline. Helium tankers from Qatar are caught in the Hormuz disruption. And the entirety of European semiconductor policy — the €43 billion Chips Act — is sitting on a material foundation it hasn't costed. In this solo episo...

Four Chokepoints: The Fortnight That Made European Technology Sovereignty Unavoidable Solo episode — Part 1 of the Four Chokepoints series --- On the morning of 8 April, four supply chains began to fail at once. Not in the same country. Not in the same industry. Not even on the same continent. The headlines called it an oil shock. It isn't. In this episode, I trace the line from the Strait of Horm...

Yesterday, Anthropic announced Project Glasswing — a cybersecurity coalition built around Claude Mythos Preview, a frontier AI model so proficient at finding and exploiting software vulnerabilities that it cannot safely be released to the public. In just weeks of testing, Mythos Preview has autonomously identified thousands of zero-day vulnerabilities in every major operating system and every majo...

When an AI agent shops on your behalf, pays on your behalf, and negotiates on your behalf — who’s actually in charge? And when something goes wrong, who carries the liability? In the debut episode of The Control Layer, Amer Altaf sits down with Andrew Dunbar, Chief Information Security Officer at Shopify, to unpack the security architecture behind agentic commerce — a world where autonomous AI age...