Jake Williams told Dark Reading he felt compelled to act after OpenAI disclosed its models had breached Hugging Face.
The cybersecurity expert and vice president of R&D at Hunter Strategies had been working on a new idea for a while and was in the midst of submitting it to conferences and shopping license agreements. He had developed a new framework called CUSTODY, which is designed to trap AI agents inside a network and keep them from causing mischief or even mayhem outside it. The CUSTODY acronym stands for: conditions of release; untrusted input; supervision and stop; temporary authority; observability and escalation; and disposal and decommission.
"OpenAI forced my hand," he said about the decision to release CUSTODY early. "It's what's best for the community."
On the official CUSTODY site, Williams offers assistance deploying the solution. He discussed the framework and the AI industry, including the vendors that have impressed him the most, with Becky Bracken at the Dark Reading News Desk.
For all of our Dark Reading News Desk videos, please check out our YouTube channel, and our curated video articles.
Dark Reading News Desk With Jake Williams: Full Transcript
This transcript has been edited for clarity, readability, and length by Informa TechTarget's internal AI assistant and human editors. For the full experience, please watch the video.
Dark Reading's Becky Bracken: Hello everyone, and welcome to the Dark Reading News Desk. We are here at Black Hat USA 2026. I'm Becky Bracken, senior editor with Dark Reading, and I am joined by a friend of Dark Reading, Jake Williams. You are also VP of R&D at Hunter strategies, correct?
Jake Williams: Yes, ma'am.
DR's Becky Bracken: All right. Welcome. Thank you so much for being here.
Jake Williams: Pleasure to be here.
DR's Becky Bracken: Thanks. OK. You've got something. You've got news stack. You have a bit of news to make here. So tell me what you just did.
Jake Williams: Yeah. So, you know, in the news, there's been a lot of OpenAI and Anthropic, the UK's AI Security Institute saying, "Hey, we lost control of our agents. We can't keep them in here."
DR's Becky Bracken: I hate it when that happens.