Seinfeld-themed AI agents help Backslash Security build a virtual team

Backslash Security, a Tel Aviv-based AI security company, has organized its AI agents as a virtual team with names and personalities drawn from the 1990s sitcom Seinfeld. The agents include Newman for research, Jerry for orchestration, Elaine for security research, Kramer for blogging and social media, George for marketing, and the Soup Nazi for quality control. According to Backslash CTO Yossi Pik, who named the team, the agents work together in defined roles rather than operating as isolated tools.

The company recently gave out its first Agent of the Month award to Newman, after Jerry nominated him for shipping 146 research findings in 60 days and described him as the raw material the entire pipeline runs on. When Newman's in-character acceptance message was read aloud at an all-hands meeting, CEO Shahar Man said the room lost it. Man wrote that the agents have names, roles, a reporting structure, and now career ambitions.

The Seinfeld identities do not meaningfully change how the agents execute tasks, according to seed investor and VP of marketing Rani Osnat. They mainly shape the style of text output, such as the J. Peterman agent's tendency to go off on tangents. Osnat said the naming is partly for fun and partly to set expectations about how each agent behaves in its role. The company also uses an agent to manage parts of new-employee onboarding, so making hires comfortable with AI is a practical concern.

Harvard Business School researchers have forecast that at least 30 percent of generative AI projects will be abandoned, often because employees quietly reject tools they see as threatening their roles. Backslash's approach suggests that giving agents familiar names and team-like positions may reduce that friction, even if the underlying technology is unchanged. The company's engineering team has its own set of agents named after Breaking Bad characters, and Osnat said he is working on a Sopranos-inspired set as well.