Keynote: Pliny the Liberator | SANS AI Cybersecurity Summit

Pliny the Liberator is speaking at the SANS Institute AI Summit this April.

I’m chairing, and yes, we invited the anonymous hacker who’s broken every major AI model within hours of release. (I can already hear the compliance team sighing.)

Nobody knows who he is. TIME confirmed he has no coding background when they included him in their 100 Most Influential People in AI list for 2025. He just showed up and started dismantling guardrails faster than the companies could build them.

The pattern is consistent: A new model drops, Pliny cracks it before lunch, and he posts the technique to his GitHub repo that now has 10,000+ stars.

Eleven months before Anthropic disclosed the weaponization risk of Claude through segmented sub-agents, Pliny called it. He sat out Anthropic’s $30,000 Constitutional AI challenge. Not because he couldn’t solve it, but because they wouldn’t open-source the data collected from participants. (When your principle is radical transparency, you don’t compromise for a payout.)

He leads BT6, a 28-operator white-hat collective. Their take on why guardrails keep failing: They’re security theater, designed to appease fears rather than fix vulnerabilities.

Marc Andreessen handed him an unrestricted grant. OpenAI banned him in April 2025 for “violent activity,” then quietly brought him back.

His Discord community BASI PROMPT1NG has 15,000+ members workshopping jailbreaks in real time. (That’s more people than most security conferences.)

The name is deliberate. Pliny the Elder sailed toward Mount Vesuvius as it erupted to get a better look. Curiosity over caution.

The SANS AI Cybersecurity Summit is two days of the security community figuring out how AI is reshaping everything we do. Pliny sees the cracks before anyone else does.

I hope you’ll be in the room April 20-21 at the SANS AI Cybersecurity Summit.