About this episode

Chad Butler discusses drone delivery, AI, and the implications of autonomous failures in engineering.

This is the full interview version of our conversation with Chad Butler. Chad previously worked in product security at Amazon and was involved with Prime Air, Amazon's drone delivery program. He joins Joe Patti and Adam Roth to talk about drone delivery, FAA rules, GPS spoofing, detect-and-avoid, ADS-B, autonomous vehicles, AI agents, and the engineering culture needed when software failures can become physical-world safety failures. Topics include: Prime Air and product security commercial drone delivery risk Part 107 and Part 108 beyond visual line of sight operations GPS spoofing and drone capture detect-and-avoid vs right of way ADS-B tradeoffs why pilots may not reliably see drones autonomous vehicles and AI agents adversarial inputs and edge cases public trust after catastrophic failures Challenger, Feynman, and ignored engineering warnings

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• Eva Galperin: Stalkerware, Surveillance, and Real-World Harm · July 7, 2026 · 55 min
• Autonomous Systems Have a Security Problem with Chad Butler · June 25, 2026 · 27 min
• Drone-based Hacking Explained with Luke Canfield · June 17, 2026 · 17 min

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