Written by Ido Shlomo, CTO and Co-Founder, Token Security
As organizations rapidly adopt AI assistants and autonomous agents to streamline workflows and boost efficiency, they may be unwittingly expanding their attack surface. AI agents, whether embedded in IT operations, customer service processes, or LLM-based internal tools, are acting on our behalf, making decisions, accessing sensitive data, and executing automated actions at machine speed.
The challenge? Most security frameworks weren’t built with these new agent actors in mind. We’ve spent years refining Zero Trust for users and applications, but we now need to ask a difficult question: What happens when the user is a self-directed piece of software?
The answer begins with a renewed commitment to Zero Trust to be applied not just to people and traditional services, but to every AI agent operating inside our systems.
The Rise of Autonomous Agents
For decades, identity was a human-centric concern. Then came service accounts, containers, and APIs (machine identities) that demanded their own governance. Now we face the next evolution: agentic identities.
AI agents behave with the flexibility of humans, but at the scale and velocity of machines. Unlike static code, they learn, adapt, and make autonomous decisions. That means their behavior is harder to predict, and their access requirements change dynamically.
Yet many of these agents today operate with hard-coded credentials, excessive privileges, and no real accountability. In essence, we’ve handed the intern an admin badge and told them to move fast.
If CISOs want to deploy AI safely and securely, these agents must become first-class identities, governed with even more rigor than any employee or application.
Securing Agentic AI: A Free Guide from Token Security AI agents aren't just following instructions, they're taking action. See how Token Security is helping enterprises redefine access control for the age of Agentic AI, where actions, intent, and accountability must align. Download it here
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