Securing and Ensuring the Speed of AI: Aviatrix CEO Doug Merritt Live at the Jefferies AI Summit on September 22

Santa Clara, Calif., Sept. 18, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Aviatrix, pioneering the Cloud Native Security Fabric for the Containment Era, today announced that CEO and Chairman Doug Merritt will participate in a fireside chat at the 2026 Jefferies AI Summit. The session, titled “Securing and Ensuring the Speed of AI,” will be moderated by Brent Thill, Managing Director and tech sector leader for software/internet research, and Joseph Gallo, software research analyst, both of Jefferies, on September 22 at 2:25 p.m. PT.

“Enterprises are racing to deploy AI, but speed without containment is just accelerated risk,” said Doug Merritt, CEO and Chairman of Aviatrix. “AI agents and workloads are multiplying faster than security teams can review them, and every one of them inherits the access paths of the infrastructure it runs on. The question is no longer whether AI will reshape the enterprise, it is whether security architecture can keep pace.”

The discussion will explore how the rapid adoption of AI workloads is intensifying the challenges of the Containment Era. AI agents are often ephemeral enough to evade traditional agent-based controls, privileged enough to concentrate risk, and deployed fast enough to outrun manual review. As enterprises scale AI across cloud environments, the blast radius of a single compromised workload or misused agent grows with every path it inherits.

“The debate over slowing AI development misses the more urgent problem. The frontier models in use today, Fable, Astra, Kimi K3, already proved the offensive capability. The open-weight releases among them cannot be recalled once they are downloaded, and the closed ones are reached through stolen API keys, so either way the capability is loose. Their cyber capability is a byproduct of getting better at code, not a feature anyone can remove,” added Merritt. “An attacker armed with that capability currently has an asymmetric offensive advantage, and that crisis plays out over the next two years whether the labs agree on anything or not.”

Merritt will explore how containment addresses this architectural gap by enforcing explicit communication policy at the workload level. The Aviatrix Cloud Native Security Fabric provides a single policy plane with distributed enforcement across cloud environments, allowing enterprises to govern what every workload, service, and AI agent can reach, without forcing traffic through centralized chokepoints or slowing the pace of AI innovation.

WHO

• Doug Merritt, Chief Executive Officer and Chairman, Aviatrix
• Brent Thill, Managing Director, Tech Sector Leader, Software/Internet Research, Jefferies
• Joseph Gallo, Software Research Analyst, Jefferies

WHEN

Tuesday, September 22, 2026, 2:25 p.m. PT

About Aviatrix

Aviatrix® is pioneering the Cloud Native Security Fabric, the architecture the Containment Era requires. The Cloud Native Security Fabric governs every workload communication path across every cloud, every VPC, every Kubernetes cluster, and every serverless function, from a single policy plane. One rule. Universal propagation. Enforced at the workload, not at a chokepoint. Trusted by the world's leading enterprises. For more information, visit aviatrix.ai.

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