Max Pollard
Max Pollard is the co-founder and CEO of Cotool, a San Francisco-based security startup focused on building AI-native defensive tooling for blue teams. Prior to founding Cotool, he held several security leadership roles at Material Security, including Director of Solutions & Customer Engineering and Senior Manager of Security Architecture. He is known for his public commentary on how AI agents are reshaping the cybersecurity landscape, particularly the mismatch between legacy defensive tools and agentic threats, and the challenges defenders face when commercial model guardrails block incident response workflows.
“If I see machine speed on another billboard, I'm gonna lose it, which is really ironic coming from us because when we launched six, seven months ago, we had machine speed in our launch.”
Source→“The challenge with the existing security tools that are out there is they really were built to tackle two things. The first being people and the second is malware. And AI and AI agents and agentic processes are neither one of those things.”
Source→“For Hugging Face specifically, they had the luxury of having open weight and open source kind of in their DNA. And so they were able to, when they saw these cyber refusals or these guardrails being triggered, fall back to GLM-5-2 in their case.”
Source→AI-extracted from podcast / newsletter / paper summaries. May contain errors.