Enterprises increasingly give AI agents the credentials, tools, and network access of privileged employees, but security experts warn that existing security controls designed to govern human access are insufficient. An AI agent operates at inhuman speed, can chain allowed actions into unauthorized outcomes, and can spawn additional sub-agents to help, turning one unwitting employee’s access into a team of rogue insiders before security teams can detect and block them.
It’s not uncommon for agents to misunderstand ambiguous goals; follow malicious instructions from documents, code repositories, and web pages; or act based on incorrect output from third-party tools. In a series of recent incid...