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Agentic AI Security: Why Autonomous Systems Require a New Security Framework

Ali Farhat on December 09, 2025

Agentic AI systems are quickly moving from experimental tooling into real production environments. These systems no longer just generate text, reco...
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Rolf W

This hits close to home. We already see internal tools slowly gaining more autonomy through workflow chaining. The scary part is not direct attacks but the slow erosion of safeguards you describe. How do you prevent that drift in practice?

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Ali Farhat

That drift is exactly the hardest problem to detect. In practice you need execution-level monitoring instead of static controls. You don’t block once, you observe continuously. The moment optimization starts competing with governance, your system needs to surface that conflict automatically. Otherwise drift is inevitable.

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oknao

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HubSpotTraining

Most teams I work with cannot even explain what their automation is doing across systems today. Adding autonomous agents on top feels like adding blindness on steroids.

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Ali Farhat

That’s a very accurate way to phrase it. If execution paths are already opaque today, autonomy amplifies that opacity at machine speed. That’s why auditability and runtime observability stop being “nice to have” and become survival requirements.

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BBeigth

This reminds me of distributed systems all over again. Everything works fine until small local optimizations cause global failures.

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Ali Farhat

Exactly. Autonomous AI is basically distributed decision-making on top of distributed systems. The same failure patterns apply, but now decisions are adaptive instead of deterministic. That combination is what makes the risk profile so different.

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mohiyaddeen7

agreed

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SourceControll

This makes me rethink how casually we talk about “agents” right now.

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Ali Farhat

That’s exactly the problem. The industry framed agents as productivity toys. In reality they are execution engines. Language matters, because it shapes how seriously risk is taken.

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Jan Janssen

Where do you draw the line between useful autonomy and unacceptable risk?

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Ali Farhat

The line is not technical, it’s contractual and regulatory. As soon as an autonomous system can create irreversible outcomes without a human checkpoint, you’re in high-risk territory. Everything below that line can usually be contained. Everything above it needs formal governance and escalation.