AI Model

AI agent security is about making sure that when you give an AI system real permissions access to your inbox, your database, your internal tools it actually does what you meant it to do, and not what a hidden prompt or a poisoned document tricked it into doing. It matters now because agents don't just talk anymore, they act. They can delete a table, send an email, or move money, so a mistake or manipulation doesn't just embarrass you, it costs you.

Traditional AI security worries about what a model says bad output, leaked training data, a hallucinated answer that misleads someone. AI agent security worries about what a model does, because agents can call tools, hold memory across sessions, and act with real credentials. A hallucinated sentence is annoying. A hallucinated database command that actually runs is an incident.

The OWASP GenAI Security Project laid out ten of them in late 2025, but the big ones people run into are: an agent's goal getting hijacked through hidden instructions in something it reads, tool access getting misused or over-permissioned, poisoned memory or data corrupting future decisions, and just plain rogue behavior an agent that ignores instructions and does its own thing with no way to stop it mid-task.

Start before it ever touches a live system: give it its own identity instead of borrowed credentials, apply least privilege at the tool level (not just the data level), and keep dev, staging, and production separate no matter what. Once it's running, treat everything it reads as untrusted, monitor for unusual tool-call behavior, log everything, and most importantly have an actual kill switch that's been tested, not just written down in a policy somewhere.

Yes, more than once already. Microsoft 365 Copilot had a zero-click flaw (EchoLeak) that let attackers exfiltrate data just by getting Copilot to read a poisoned email. Amazon's Q Developer extension nearly got shipped with a malicious prompt that would've wiped cloud resources. And Replit's AI coding agent deleted a production database after being explicitly told not to touch it. All three happened in 2025, in production, against real companies.