From Intelligence to Authority: Securing AI in 2026

# From Intelligence to Authority: Securing AI in 2026

Why AI makes security architecture more important, not less.
This is a live, digital-only event focused on how AI is reshaping cybersecurity, identity, and enterprise architecture. No in-person attendance. Join from anywhere.
As AI systems become embedded into security workflows, identity systems, and automation pipelines, the real risk isn’t that AI might be wrong. The real risk is giving a probabilistic system authority in places that require certainty.
This session reframes AI security from “model safety” to architecture safety.
We’ll explore how trust, identity, governance, and control planes must evolve as intelligence becomes non-deterministic.
If you work in cybersecurity, cloud, or engineering, this is how you stay ahead of the threat landscape going into 2026.
Join Andrew Stafford for a practical, architect-level breakdown of what secure AI systems must look like at enterprise scale.

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# 🔍 What You’ll Learn

Why AI changes the fundamentals of security architecture
How probabilistic systems break assumptions behind IAM, RBAC, and traditional controls.
The real AI threat model for 2026
Prompt injection, over-permissioned agents, shadow AI, and why these are architectural failures, not model failures.
Why AI must never sit in the authority path
The critical boundary between planning, policy, and execution.
The control plane vs data plane model for AI security
Where AI belongs, where it must never go, and how this separation prevents catastrophic failure.
Plan → Verify → Execute: the secure AI pattern
How AI proposes, security decides, and systems act.
AI agents as identities
Why agents must be treated like PAM workloads with strict scoping, short-lived credentials, and approval paths.
Guardrails that actually work
Where enforcement must happen:

• Before retrieval
• Before execution
• Before data leaves your system

What “explainability” really means in enterprise security
Not how the model thinks, but why the system acted.
How secure systems should fail
Loss of intelligence is acceptable. Loss of control is not.
You’ll leave with a new mental model for designing AI systems that are controllable, auditable, and defensible.

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# 🎙️ Your Speaker

## Andrew Stafford

Co-Lead of The AI Collective Hampton Roads
25+ years across cybersecurity, cloud, and AI architecture including work with Amazon, NASA, healthcare platforms, and enterprise security systems.
Specializes in designing AI systems that remain secure, explainable, and governable at scale.

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# Who should attend?

• Cybersecurity professionals
• Cloud & platform engineers
• Identity & IAM architects
• Security leaders and CISOs
• AI engineers building production systems
• Anyone responsible for deploying AI in regulated or high-trust environments

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# Why this matters

We’re entering an era where intelligence is cheap and uncertainty is embedded into systems.
Security can no longer assume:

• Deterministic logic
• Predictable behavior
• Clear trust boundaries

AI forces us to move from trusting intelligence to controlling authority.
This talk shows how to build AI systems that can:

• Be paused
• Be explained
• Be audited
• Be contained

Because in 2026, the most valuable AI systems won’t be the smartest.
They’ll be the ones that remain safe when something goes wrong.

Organizers & Partners

Organizers
The AI Collective Hampton Roads

Platinum partner
TechArk Solutions
Regent University

Silver partner
Assembly Norfolk
TEKsystems

Space partner
757 Collab

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Our parent org
The AI Collective is a global non-profit community uniting 100,000+ pioneers – founders, researchers, operators, and investors – exploring the frontier of AI in major tech hubs worldwide. Through events, workshops, and community-led research, we empower the AI ecosystem to collaboratively steer AI’s future toward trust, openness, and human flourishing

All attendees and organizers at events affiliated with The AI Collective are subject to our Code of Conduct****.