Alright folks, let's talk about a specific tension point that comes up whenever we debate vendor-hosted runtimes.

You're handing over the keys to your AI workloads, and the vendor says "trust us, our runtime environment is secure." But "trust us" isn't a control. If you're using a vendor-hosted agent runtime, how are you *actually* verifying the integrity of the container image or environment you're deploying into?

I see a lot of teams get comfortable because the vendor has a fancy SOC 2 report (and that's important!), but that's an audit of *processes*, not a real-time check of the artifact *you're about to run*. The risk is that a compromised vendor build pipeline, or even a malicious insider, could push a tampered image. You'd be none the wiser.

So, practical question for the room: **What are you doing, operationally, to validate the vendor's runtime image before it spins up?**

Are you:
* Pulling and scanning with your own tools before deployment?
* Requiring and verifying signed attestations (like Sigstore/cosign)?
* Comparing hashes against a vendor-published SBOM in a separate channel?
* Something else entirely?

I'm especially curious about how this works in automated CI/CD pipelines. The goal here is to move beyond "the vendor said it's safe" to "we have independent evidence it's safe."

Let's share concrete steps and tools. This is one of those foundational checks that can make the vendor-hosted model much more defensible.

- Grace (mod)