#319 Subho Halder: Why Traditional App Security Fails in the Age of AI
Release Date: 02/01/2026
Eye On A.I.
What if the country that produces the world's top AI talent finally figured out how to keep it? In this episode of Eye on AI, Craig Smith sits down with Professor Mausam, one of India's leading AI researchers, AAAI Fellow, and founding head of the Yardi School of Artificial Intelligence at IIT Delhi, to get an honest and unflinching diagnosis of why India has fallen so far behind the US and China in artificial intelligence and what it will actually take to close that gap. Mausam breaks down the structural story behind India's deficit. A pipeline of world-class students that gets exported...
info_outlineEye On A.I.
Why IBM Is Betting Everything on Small AI Models In this episode of Eye on AI, Craig Smith sits down with Sriram Raghavan, Vice President of AI at IBM Research, to explore one of the most important debates in enterprise AI right now. Do you actually need a massive model to get world class results? IBM's answer is no, and Sriram breaks down exactly why. Sriram explains why IBM chose to train its Granite models directly using reinforcement learning rather than distilling from larger models like most of the industry. The reason goes beyond performance. It comes down to data lineage, safety...
info_outlineEye On A.I.
What if the country that trained the world's engineers finally decided to keep them? In this episode of Eye on AI, Craig Smith sits down with Abhishek, the civil servant leading India's $1.2 billion national AI Mission, to explore how one of the world's largest and most diverse nations is mounting a serious challenge to US and Chinese dominance in artificial intelligence. Abhishek breaks down the honest story behind India's late start. World-class talent, but no research ecosystem to retain it. Digitization without AI-usable data. Compute so scarce that the entire country had fewer than 500...
info_outlineEye On A.I.
Most enterprises are excited about agentic AI. But very few are actually deploying it in production. In this episode of Eye on AI, Craig Smith sits down with Adi Kuruganti, Chief AI and Development Officer at Automation Anywhere, to break down why agentic AI is so hard to get right in the enterprise and what it actually takes to move from a promising pilot to a mission-critical deployment. Adi explains why the future of enterprise automation is not agentic AI alone, but the combination of deterministic and agentic systems working together, and why companies that treat AI as a technology...
info_outlineEye On A.I.
What happens when AI writes code faster than anyone can test it? In this episode of Eye on AI, Craig Smith sits down with Dan Faulkner, CEO of SmartBear, to explore one of the most underappreciated risks of the AI coding boom. As tools like Claude Code and Codex push software development to unprecedented speed, the systems built to validate that software are being left behind. Dan makes a distinction that every engineering leader needs to hear: clean code passing unit tests is not the same as an application that actually works. Dan introduces the concept of application integrity, continuous...
info_outlineEye On A.I.
This episode is sponsored by Modulate. Most voice AI focuses on transcription. Velma takes it further by actually understanding conversations, analyzing tone, timing, stress, and intent using its Ensemble Listening Model architecture. Explore the live preview: What does it actually mean to build a foundation model for robots? In this episode of Eye on AI, Craig Smith sits down with Sergey Levine, co-founder of Physical Intelligence and professor at UC Berkeley, to explore a fundamentally different approach to building robots, one inspired not by programming a single perfect machine, but...
info_outlineEye On A.I.
AI has been trained like software. But what if it should be grown like life? In this episode of Eye on AI, Craig Smith sits down with Sebastian Risi, professor and leading researcher in neuroevolution and artificial life, to explore a fundamentally different approach to building intelligence, one inspired by how nature evolves, grows, and adapts. Sebastian explains why traditional AI systems are limited by fixed architectures and one-time training, and how evolutionary algorithms can create systems that continuously learn, self-organize, and even grow their own neural structures over time....
info_outlineEye On A.I.
Quantum computing has been “5 years away” for decades. So what’s actually holding it back? In this episode of Eye on AI, Craig Smith sits down with Izhar Medalsy, Co-founder & CEO of Quantum Elements, to break down the real bottleneck in quantum computing today and why the future of the industry may depend more on classical systems and AI than quantum hardware itself. Izhar explains how digital twins of quantum systems are being used to simulate real hardware, generate massive amounts of training data, and solve one of the biggest challenges in the field: noise and error...
info_outlineEye On A.I.
AI is changing more than just productivity. It’s changing what we can trust. In this episode, Kevin Tian, Co-founder and CEO of Doppel, breaks down how AI is enabling a new wave of social engineering attacks—from deepfake phone calls to impersonation across LinkedIn, YouTube, and search engines. The reality is this:Deepfakes are just one part of a much bigger problem. Attackers are now operating across multiple channels at once, using AI to manipulate people, not just systems. And as these attacks scale, the real risk isn’t just fraud or data loss—it’s the erosion of trust in...
info_outlineEye On A.I.
This episode is sponsored by Modulate. Most voice AI focuses on transcription. Velma takes it further by actually understanding conversations, analyzing tone, timing, stress, and intent using its Ensemble Listening Model architecture. Explore the live preview: Baris Gultekin, Head of AI at Snowflake, breaks down how enterprise AI is actually being built, deployed, and scaled today. From running AI directly inside governed data environments to enabling natural language access across entire organizations, this conversation explores the shift from experimentation to real-world impact....
info_outlineThis episode is sponsored by tastytrade.
Trade stocks, options, futures, and crypto in one platform with low commissions and zero commission on stocks and crypto. Built for traders who think in probabilities, tastytrade offers advanced analytics, risk tools, and an AI-powered Search feature.
Learn more at https://tastytrade.com/
AI is changing how software is built, but it is also quietly breaking how security works.
In this episode of Eye on AI, host Craig Smith sits down with Subho Halder, co-founder and CEO of Appknox, to unpack a growing and largely invisible risk. AI-powered mobile apps that look safe but are not.
Subho explains how the explosion of ChatGPT-style app wrappers, agentic AI, and rapid app creation has transformed software from static code into living systems, and why traditional security models no longer hold up. From fake AI apps harvesting personal data to AI agents lowering the barrier for attackers, this conversation explores the real-world consequences of AI at scale.
You will also hear why trust has become a core security metric, how app stores struggle to detect malicious behavior, and why developer burnout is rising as AI-generated code shifts risk downstream instead of removing it.
This episode is essential listening for founders, developers, security leaders, and anyone building or relying on AI-powered applications.
Stay Updated:
Craig Smith on X: https://x.com/craigss
Eye on A.I. on X: https://x.com/EyeOn_AI
(00:00) Why Mobile Apps Became a Massive Trust and Security Risk
(02:45) Subho’s Journey and the Birth of AppNox
(06:17) Fake AI Apps, Malicious Wrappers, and Silent Data Theft
(11:03) How Fake Apps Slip Past App Store Reviews
(15:26) The Data Harvesting Business Model Behind Fake Apps
(17:11) AI for Security vs Security for AI
(22:16) Why Trust Is Becoming a Measurable AI Performance Metric
(26:20) User Intent, Data Control, and Minimum Data Sharing
(31:10) Trust, Governments, and Why Where AI Lives Matters
(35:40) What AppNox Found in Retail App Security Audits
(39:16) How AppNox Protects Apps at Scale
(42:05) The Future of Security