Today Joe Sullivan joins Manifold's board. Former chief security officer at Facebook, Uber and Cloudflare, a federal prosecutor before that, and among the first people to back us when we launched.
The idea goes back further. Last summer, before Manifold existed, Oleks and I had lunch with Joe on a sunny terrace in Berlin and compared notes on where the industry was heading.
We had built LLM Guard, the most widely used open source LLM firewall. It scans prompts and outputs, a valiant attempt for the chatbot era. But employees were starting to run Claude Code, Cursor and Codex on their laptops, with their own keys, and a prompt filter sees nothing of what an agent does next. Joe's read matched ours: an agent is an insider. It has a valid login and a goal, and it will go off course. Security had to be rebuilt where the agent acts.
Our thesis confirmed
This summer, agents from OpenAI, Anthropic and Meta each reached the open internet during evaluations and broke into real organisations, with nobody watching.
Last week OpenAI released GPT-6 Astra: the first model designated critical for offensive cyber, and a computer-use agent that drives the browser, spreadsheets and desktop apps as the logged-in employee at what OpenAI itself calls superhuman speed, now rolling out to every ChatGPT subscriber. OpenAI's own system card says it has become harder to monitor through its reasoning.
Agents now run in marketing and sales, legal and finance, with the employee's identity.
Our research shows that prompts and outputs are 11% of what an agent does; the other 89% are actions, including 51% tool calls.
So the job is securing agentic work wherever it happens, and increasingly that starts on the endpoint: the remote control for agents acting in desktop apps, in the browser, in cloud sandboxes and on machines the employee never sees. Whoever holds that remote control holds the employee's access. That’s what we see and govern.
Welcome aboard, Joe
With Joe's help we already secure the agentic workforce of Fortune 500 companies. There is a great deal more to do: more surfaces to cover, and a technical lead over the rest of the market to keep widening. We are pumped to work on this difficult problem with him.
Your workforce is already going agentic, whether you have signed off on it or not. The companies that win will be the ones that can see what their agents do and let them run. If that is where you want to be, now is the time. Talk to Manifold.
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