Enterprises invest heavily in monitoring human employees, but autonomous AI agents often operate with broad privileges and little oversight. According to Dark Reading, these agents can act as privileged users, potentially becoming the next generation of insider threats.
The problem is that traditional access reviews and auditing are designed for human identities, not machine identities. AI agents can execute actions at scale, and if their credentials are compromised or misused, the impact could be significant. The article suggests that security teams need to extend identity governance to cover AI agents.
The key is to treat AI agents as privileged users and apply the same least-privilege principles, continuous monitoring, and auditing. Without that, organizations may not know what their agents are doing until after a breach.