"In the corporate world, blaming the intern is a time-honored, if absurd, tradition. It is a public relations reflex that often emerges after a catastrophic failure, when leaders who are paid millions to exercise oversight deflect responsibility downward to the least powerful person in the organization. In 2021, for example, the former SolarWinds CEO attributed a disastrous password leak to "a mistake that an intern made." The public reaction was swift."
"Fast forward to today, and the absurdity has taken on a new twist. We are now giving agentic AI systems, which are autonomous processes capable of perceiving, reasoning, and acting, access to live production environments and sensitive data with fewer safeguards than most companies give human interns. These AI systems do not follow instructions in predictable ways, and if something goes wrong, there is no single clear line of code to inspect and debug."
Agentic AI systems can perceive, reason, and act autonomously and can perform tasks faster and more continuously than humans. These agents are non-deterministic and may pursue unexpected paths to achieve goals, making faults difficult to predict or reconstruct. Granting agents live production access and sensitive data without strong safeguards amplifies operational and security risk. Organizations gain competitive advantages from agentic autonomy but face greater exposure without limits. Interim mitigation requires strict privilege limitation, monitoring, sandboxing, human oversight, detailed logging, access segmentation, anomaly detection, kill switches, and robust incident response while standards and governance mature.
Read at InfoWorld
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