SardineCon SF 2026 brought operators and risk leaders together in San Francisco to tackle a hard truth: fraud has gone fully agentic, and defenses need to move at machine speed to keep up.
Joseph Cox, author and founder of 404 Media, opened with why most companies aren't ready for AI-powered fraud, and shared some startling examples.
Sardine CEO Soups Ranjan followed with real attacks his team has caught this year, including deepfaked interviews, and 250,000-account fraud rings, and the shift toward narrow, specialist AI agents over single do-everything models.
The afternoon brought a candid panel on real-life AI deployments with leaders from Slope, Imprint, and Intuit, followed by firesides and roundtables on topics including foundational models, compliance, and building an AI-native risk org.
The throughline across every session? Specialist agents, proprietary data, and disciplined human-in-the-loop rollouts are what's actually working in production today.
Thank you to our speakers and the attendees who joined us. This is where the industry figures it out together, and we'll see you at the next one.