Open LLMs: Real Risks, Real Fixes

Hosted by Amir Feizpour and Michael Argast

Fri, Oct 2, 2026

4:00 PM UTC (45 minutes)

Virtual (Zoom)

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Agentic Buildcamp - A Cognitive Gym for Building AI Agents — using AI Agents
Amir Feizpour, PhD
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What you'll learn

Map the real attack surface of open models

Distinguish exfiltration risk, weight tampering, and fine-tuning-based jailbreaks — they need different defenses.

Know why safety fine-tuning is fragile

Alignment can be stripped with ~10 adversarial examples for under $0.20 — plan defenses accordingly.

Choose the right deployment model for your risk profile

Compare closed-remote, open-remote, and open-local hosting on exfiltration, control, and operational burden.

Apply concrete mitigations today

Isolate system prompts, sign and pin supply-chain artifacts, and layer controls outside the model itself.

Why this topic matters

Open-weight models are spreading fast into production, but their security model differs sharply from closed APIs — fine-tuning can strip safety guardrails for pennies, and local deployment shifts the full security burden onto the adopting team. Builders and security leads need a practical framework for evaluating these tradeoffs before they ship, not after an incident.

You'll learn from

Amir Feizpour

Founder @ Aggregate Intellect

Amir Feizpour is the founder, CEO, and Chief Scientist at Aggregate Intellect building a generative business brain for service and science based companies. Amir has built and grown a global community of 5000+ AI practitioners and researchers gathered around topics in AI research, engineering, product development, and responsibility. Prior to this, Amir was an NLP Product Lead at Royal Bank of Canada. Amir held a research position at University of Oxford conducting experiments on quantum computing resulting in high profile publications and patents. Amir holds a PhD in Physics from University of Toronto. Amir also serves the AI ecosystem as an advisor at MaRS Discovery District, works with several startups as fractional chief AI officer, and engages with a wide range of community audiences (business executives to hands-on developers) through training and educational programs. Amir leads Aggregate Intellect’s R&D via several academic collaborations.

Michael Argast

CEO @ Kobalt.io

Michael Argast is the co-founder and CEO of Kobalt.io, where he leads cyber security programs for small and mid-sized organizations. He brings over 20 years of security industry experience, including leadership roles at TELUS Security Solutions and as Global Head of Sales Engineering at Sophos, where he led a 120-person team across 17 countries.

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