How Do You Build Security for AI Agents That Don’t Exist Yet?

AI agents are rapidly evolving toward more autonomy, more context, greater reach and more authority to act. We have to build security now for what’s coming next.

We are making enormous bets right now about how to secure software two years from now, at exactly the moment when software is changing too quickly for anyone to know what it will look like.

Every few months there is a new agent architecture, framework or standard. By 2028, many of the technologies we are designing for today will have changed dramatically or disappeared altogether.

But we can’t wait until then to find out what survives. We have to make security decisions now for a software landscape we can’t yet see.

This is what happens during a period of rapid evolution. New species appear quickly, most disappear, and over time the traits that give some of them an advantage begin to define what comes next.

The jellyfish, the frog and the brain

Most of the software running in companies today belongs to the old species. It is, in evolutionary terms, a jellyfish: sensors wired to reflexes, with no brain making a decision in the middle. A developer decides what should happen and writes that decision into code. Later, a request comes in, a pre-wired path fires and a response goes out.