Who Owns Your AI Security Policy? with Chris Cochran

Who Owns Your AI Security Policy? with Chris Cochran

From Hacker Valley Studio by Hacker Valley Media

May 18, 2026 · 35 min · Season 6 · Episode 426

About this episode

Ron Eddings and Chris Cochran discuss the importance of AI security policies and the SANS AI Security Maturity Model.

Right now, someone in your organization is probably feeding sensitive data into an AI system that nobody approved. So when something goes wrong, who's responsible? And more critically, do you even have a policy in place to answer that question? Ron Eddings sits down with his Hacker Valley co-founder, Chris Cochran, now serving as SANS Field CISO and VP of AI Security, to talk about his freshly released SANS AI Security Maturity Model, a practical framework built for security leaders who need to stop philosophizing and start making decisions. They cover the three pillars of AI security maturity: utilizing AI for defense, protecting AI itself, and governing it across the organization. Chris then gets real about where most enterprises actually stand (hint: not as far along as they think). Listen for a conversation that meets you wherever you are: skeptic, early adopter, or somewhere in between. Impactful Moments 00:00 - Introduction 03:00 - Chris Cochran: from Co-Founder to SANS Field CISO 04:20 - Your board is pushing AI before security is ready 06:00 - Tiers of AI uses: summarization to full automation 07:50 - When AI shouldn't make the final call 10:10 - Bite-sized AI: starting…

People in this episode

Host: Ron Eddings

Guest: Chris Cochran

Topics covered

  • AI security
  • data governance
  • security policy
  • AI maturity model
  • enterprise risk
  • technology adoption

Keywords

  • AI security
  • data protection
  • SANS AI Security Maturity Model
  • enterprise AI
  • security leaders

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: SANS, Hacker Valley Media

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