SAN FRANCISCO — RSA Conference organizers announced Wednesday the creation of two new expo sections to address what they described as "a classification crisis" among exhibitors: "AI-Native," for companies that were built on AI from the ground up, and "Kinda AI," for the 340 exhibitors whose executive teams mandated the addition of AI to their products sometime in the last twelve months.

The "Kinda AI" section, located in a converted loading dock adjacent to Moscone South, features limited cell reception and a single bathroom. An RSA spokesperson said the conditions are "temporary" and "broadly consistent with the quality of the AI capabilities being advertised."

Placement was determined by a review panel that evaluated each exhibitor's AI claims against their actual product. One legacy firewall vendor was flagged after its booth materials referenced "AI-powered threat detection" for a product that, according to three customers who spoke to the Exploit, "is the same appliance we've been running since 2019, except the admin console has a chatbot now that hallucinates firewall rules." The vendor's CTO reportedly told the panel the chatbot was "phase one of a broader AI strategy" that the board requested after their CEO attended a dinner with Sequoia.

"We've had anomaly detection for six years. In January our CMO asked us to change every instance of 'machine learning' to 'AI' in the docs. That was the entire AI roadmap. I'm told it tested well with analysts."

A separate subsection, labeled "AI-Adjacent," was created for four vendors whose only AI integration was adding "Ask AI" buttons that route to a lightly fine-tuned GPT wrapper. One attendee reported clicking the button on a vulnerability management platform and receiving a response that confidently recommended patching a CVE that had been withdrawn two years ago. "It answered in a very authoritative tone though," the attendee said. "So that was nice."