An AI now judges every move Rubrik's agents make, its AI chief says
But no one has measured whether this AI judge is actually correct.
1Introduction
Rubrik's GM of AI Dev Rishi revealed at VB Transform 2026 that the company has developed a system where an AI evaluates every action of its AI agents in real time. However, the accuracy of this system remains unmeasured.
2Security policies vs implementation
At a CISO roundtable, all participants had written AI governance policies but struggled with practical implementation. Rubrik's 'YOLO mode' experiment exemplifies this dilemma in action.
3The YOLO mode experiment
Rubrik configured its data security agents to operate without human approval. Each action is evaluated by an AI called SAGE against company policies. This radical approach is being tested internally first.
4Developer pushback
The requirement for every command to run in approval mode during Claude Code and Cowork pilots sparked significant developer resistance. A 120-message Slack thread criticized it as 'security theater.'
5The efficiency paradox
Rubrik Zero Labs research found monitoring and approving agent actions takes more time than the agents save. A survey of 1,600+ IT leaders supports this counterintuitive finding.
6SAGE's role
The Semantic AI Governance Engine (SAGE) serves as an arbitration layer in Rubrik Agent Cloud, monitoring every agent action and interpreting the intent behind it against natural language policies.
7The security bottleneck
Rishi's 200 customer conversations revealed security approvals - not cost - as the primary barrier to AI ROI. While 66% of enterprises allow or are moving toward zero-human-review deployments, only 5% fully trust automated evaluations.
8Limits of written rules
Rubrik's internal policies exposed enforcement challenges. A rule like 'agents must respect customer data policy' requires interpreting three pages of legal text - something traditional systems can't do.
9Language models as auditors
Rishi's team bet that language-understanding models could police other models, leading to SAGE. This approach provides intent-reading capabilities beyond traditional tools.
10Conclusion
Rubrik's experiment establishes a new paradigm in AI governance. Systems like SAGE promise automated oversight based on semantic understanding rather than rigid rules. But their reliability remains unproven.
Original article: VentureBeat — Rubrik'in yapay zeka yargıcı her hareketi değerlendiriyor