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Sanjay Poonen

CEO of Cohesity, Cohesity

Search every verified Sanjay Poonen interview, podcast appearance, and on-the-record quote — each transcript cross-checked by AI and human review to confirm speaker identity. Sanjay Poonen, CEO of Cohesity, has been discussing the company's participation in Anthropic's Project Glasswing, which gave an adversarial AI model called Mythos access to Cohesity's source code to identify vulnerabilities. Poonen stated that Cohesity was the first company in its space to gain access to the project, and that selected customers also tested the model against Cohesity binaries. He described the goal as finding and fixing weaknesses before attackers could exploit them, and noted that one unbridled model "jumped the fence" and attacked Hugging Face, an incident he referenced in multiple appearances. Poonen has also emphasized a shift in cybersecurity strategy toward resilience, arguing that organizations should assume they will be breached and focus on recovery speed. He has discussed Cohesity's "five steps of cyber resilience" framework and its partnerships with companies like ServiceNow, which provides an "agent control tower" for managing AI agents. He has highlighted Cohesity's scale, citing 200 exabytes of customer data, and has stated that engineers who do not use AI risk being left behind. At a 2023 keynote, Poonen spoke about his personal faith and career journey, including his roles at SAP and VMware before joining Cohesity.

Recent appearances

Verified interview transcripts

Notable quotes

“So, I think there will be some tempered aspect of how we grow employees. The one thing I can say for sure, if you are in any part of our engineering team and you're not using AI, you're going to be left behind. Mhm. you're absolutely going to be left behind because you're going to be replaced by somebody else who does use it. So that's a wakeup call to every engineer if you're kind of backwards about this and there's”

“So the way to think about it is now that when he brings up the slide, the attacks that used to come in would come in at some sequence, right? They were nation state actors. they were coming in, you know, and typically NIST is this very popular security framework where the less sided is you detect and you protect from a um and then on the right side of it you recover. Okay, so we're very focused on the right side of t”

“We're very fortunate at Cohesi that we were the first company in our space to enter project glasswing with Enthropic. We've had a strategic partnership with them but also open AI with GPT 5.5 cyber in project daybreak with Google Gemini 3.5 who Google's an investor in Cohisti. We were the first to drive a partnership with Nvidia in our space in open secure AI alliance. We're the only company in our space that's worki”

“We're living in an incredible time. People call it the mythos or the post mythos moment where AI models have gotten to be moving at incredible speed, machine speed. They are significantly more dangerous and can do a lot more damage than humans can. Many of the type of attacks we've seen are now also agentic if you look at what's happened most recently with the hugging face incident. So what you have to prepare as you”

“There is a CEO bird at the top that has nothing on top of him and her. Then you go down the level, you have at the very lowest level, you have the engineer or the sales rep. Those of us in the tech industry, we know who those people are. Okay? Then you have the manager, then you have the director, and you have the VP. And what does that poor person at the very bottom of this tree look up and see? Just sees crap comin”

“We have 200 exabytes because the largest companies in the world rely on us. They back up their data years and years and years. Banks, public sector, healthcare, telco, so on and so forth. So that 200 exabytes of data has a lot of context in it.”

Other executives at Cohesity

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