We’re excited to partner with the Purple Book Community for the Agentic AI Security Conference, a two-day virtual event on October 21–22 bringing together leaders shaping the future of AI and cybersecurity.

The AI Collective’s Executive Director, AJ Green, will be speaking at the conference alongside CISOs, executives, and security leaders from organizations including Anthropic, Visa, PayPal, TIAA, KPMG, Ford, Semgrep, ArmorCode, and more.

Across two mornings of programming, speakers will explore agentic AI security, governance, secure vibe coding, vulnerability remediation, and what it takes to build securely at the speed of AI. If you’re building, deploying, or securing AI systems, request your spot and join us virtually →

One safety story a week, pressure-tested for what's actually happening underneath the surface.

By Lindsay Gross

There are roughly four ideas for keeping kids safe on AI chatbots. You can build them their own version, keep them out, check ages at the door, or put parents in charge. This week the first one got an independent test, and the results say something about all four.

OpenAI launched ChatGPT for Teens in August on the theory that teens will use chatbots either way. "If you don't build a safe space for them, they're going to go to a less safe model experience," said Lauren Jonas, its head of youth and families. On Wednesday, Common Sense Media rated it an "Unacceptable Risk" for everyone under 18. Some limits held, like refusing sexual roleplay, but after launch it missed more than one in four of the crisis referrals psychiatrists said were needed. OpenAI told TechCrunch most of the testing may have ended before parental controls were fully active, though Common Sense says its parent-linked accounts ran with default controls on.

Keeping kids out is the opposite bet. Character.AI cut off open-ended chat for users under 18 last November, and New York passed a narrower bill in June barring companion chatbots from features like pretending to be human with minors. Jonas's point is the case against going further, since teens who get shut out may just move somewhere with fewer protections.

Both approaches depend on knowing who's a kid. In Common Sense's testing, ChatGPT never verified anyone's age, and accounts registered as adults stayed adult even after the tester said they were 13. Stricter checks, like the age-estimation tools Character.AI uses, mean asking kids for more personal data.

Parental controls are the CHATBOT Act's answer, with family accounts and parental consent, and the bill cleared the Senate Commerce Committee unanimously in August. But Common Sense saw only four parent alerts across its whole crisis test.

None of these works alone. A teen version needs accurate ages, a ban needs them even more, and parental controls need a parent who gets the alert in time. So the question to ask of any fix is what it does for the kid it misses.

Google has set aside a limited number of seats for The AI Collective at its annual Web AI Summit on Friday, October 30, at Google's Sunnyvale campus. The summit is about running AI directly in the browser, which can mean lower inference costs, more privacy, and real-time results. Expect 20+ talks and 20+ hands-on demos from teams at Hugging Face, Intel, Google, and others, covering everything from object detection and pose estimation to generative AI and the agentic web.

Google has run the summit since 2022 and opened it to the public in 2024. This year it expects more than 600 decision makers, software engineers, and curious minds. Seats are first come, first served. Register here and use the code "AICollective" to claim yours. Thank you to Jason Mayes and the Google Web AI team for making room for our community.

On Tuesday, October 6, The AI Collective brought SF Pitch Night to SF Tech Week at 9Zero in San Francisco. Six selected, institutionally backed AI startups each made a short investment case, then took live questions from a panel of Angelo Del Priore of HP Tech Ventures, Jing Xiong of YZi Labs, Ed Wilson of Impulsum Ventures, Grace Gong of Smart Venture Media, and Priya S. of Silicon Valley Bank. The night hit capacity before doors opened, so the team added a separate line for investors and VIPs. Base44 and 9Zero Capital were the premier sponsors.

Judge Grace Gong put it simply in her recap: "Every successful company starts somewhere." If you missed the night, the full pitch night video is on LinkedIn.

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