Why a US Counterterrorism Expert Left to Build a $14M AI Safety Startup | Cinder, Glen Wise

Glen Wise, co-founder and CEO of Cinder, went from hunting terrorists for the US Government to fighting AI’s darkest threats—raising $14M in under a year. While Silicon Valley raced to "move fast and break things," Glen and his team saw what others missed: platforms had zero infrastructure to stop deepfakes, nation-state attacks, and non-consensual intimate imagery at scale. At Cinder, they built the "Decision Spectrum"—a framework handling everything from simple fraud to complex adversarial networks. The work is brutal. Moderators burn out facing humanity’s worst. But Glen’s team asks one question: if not us, then who? 00:00 Intro 01:27 A…