This week, the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) announced a new listening exercise, the AI Agent Standards Initiative, which it hopes will provide a roadmap for addressing agentic AI hurdles and, it said, ensure that the technology “is widely adopted with confidence.” AI agents, which have now ascended to the status of enterprise tools, are designed to be autonomous and powerful: ambiguous but ominous concepts where boundaries and limits are not always easy to define or understand. The risk this poses in terms of misuse, error, and unintended consequences is striking. However, working under the direction of the Center for AI Standards and Innovation (CAISI), set up wi...