The Edge Of Agency: Defending Against The Risks Of Agentic AI
Akamai Technologies, Friday, August 15th, 2025
Agentic AI delivers greater autonomy, but at the cost of increased complexity and unpredictability.
Companies are using agentic applications to autonomously execute business processes. Semi-independent agents go beyond conventional generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) risks by chaining through memory, tools, and other agents, which expands the attack surface, blurs trust boundaries, increases the blast radius, and introduces new classes of attack.
The immature agentic ecosystem, built for functionality and not for security, combined with agents operating under broad mandates, leaves the door open to impersonation attacks and unauthorized access.
Multi-agent systems extend the threat beyond a single compromised agent, creating new opportunities for lateral propagation and cascading behaviors that escalate localized issues into systemic failures through agent-to-agent interactions.
As businesses increasingly allow AI agents to access applications on users' behalf, the same interfaces used by helpful agents can also be exploited by malicious ones - obscuring the line between legitimate autonomous use and targeted abuse.