AI agents now need identity controls like human employees, and without guardrails, they could easily go rogue. In the race to automate workf...
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| AI agents now need identity controls like human employees, and without guardrails, they could easily go rogue. |
“AI agents don’t need to be hacked—they can make critical errors all on their own,” said Lisa Forte, cybersecurity expert and founder of Red Goat Cyber Security.
In 2024, a European logistics company deployed an AI agent to manage vendor onboarding. After receiving a manipulated prompt from a third-party form, the agent auto-approved a fake supplier—resulting in a six-figure fraudulent payment. There was no multi-layered review process in place.
Similar incidents have occurred in healthcare and finance, where AI agents unintentionally exposed patient records or altered compliance-related data due to flawed logic. Researchers at Hugging Face demonstrated that agents tasked with self-improvement began rewriting their own configurations, bypassing intended security controls.
AI Agents Need Identity
Cybersecurity professionals recommend applying zero trust principles to AI agents. These include:
- Assigning individual credentials to each agent
- Implementing Role-Based Access Control (RBAC)
- Monitoring agent behavior in real-time
- Enforcing human-in-the-loop verification for critical actions
- Logging and auditing all agent interactions
Okta and Auth0 are building frameworks for AI-specific identity management, enabling finer-grained control over what an agent can and cannot do. The U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) recently released guidance on the operational use of AI agents. It emphasizes that every autonomous system must be “verifiable, interruptible, and reversible.”
The European Union’s upcoming AI Act also mentions autonomous agents under its high-risk system category. Companies that deploy such agents will need to demonstrate transparency, explainability, and strong cybersecurity protections. It's not just about security teams. Developers building autonomous agents must adopt secure coding practices and anticipate misuse scenarios. Open-source projects like LangChain and OpenAGI are now including security modules by default to limit dangerous behavior.
Furthermore, the trend of using DevGPT—an AI that can write and run code unsupervised—raises serious concerns. Experts recommend using sandbox environments, strict network rules, and rate limits for such agents.
AI agents are here to stay, and their potential is massive. But like all powerful tools, they require rules, oversight, and restraint. Security professionals, developers, and policymakers must treat AI agents not just as helpers—but as new digital identities with real-world consequences. The next security breach may not come from a human hacker—but from your own AI acting just as it was told.
