Should IT pros worry about rogue AI agents?

Rogue AI agents are attracting a lot of buzz within the cybersecurity and IT communities after a few high-profile incidents, but experts suggest that more stringent oversight of security controls can help organizations face down their agentic fears.

Probably the most high-profile example of the chaos that rogue agents can potentially unleash is OpenAI’s AI models recently breaking free of its testing sandbox and attempting to hack the IT infrastructure of Hugging Face, which builds tools for machine-learning applications.

Cillian Kieran, the founder and CEO of Ethyca, an AI governance and data privacy company, told IT Brew that with rogue AI agents generating “fantastically salacious headlines,” it’s critical for organizations to pay attention to strong governance policies for agentic AI, including requiring AI vendors to show their governance infrastructure such as runtime controls.

“You need a layer of tooling that says I can make my data safe to use with these models or vendors,” Kieran said. “If those models and vendors aren’t providing those tools, the enterprise should be investing in it.”

Here’s the 411. Raj Ananthanpillai, the CEO and founder of Trua, a privacy-focused risk management and identity verification organization, suggested that the issues with rogue AI agents have more to do with governance issues and misconfigured environments than a superintelligent entity deciding to wreak havoc.