Most security failures in autonomous systems start the same way.
Someone trusted identity too much.
Once an agent is authenticated, it is often treated as safe. That assumption works when humans are involved, because people pause, hesitate, and notice when something feels wrong. Autonomous agents do not do that. They act continuously and without doubt.
In AI-to-AI systems, trust becomes dangerous when it does not expire, narrow, or degrade. A valid token does not mean a valid action. A trusted agent does not mean trusted behavior forever.
This is why Zero Trust cannot stop at identity.
Identity answers who is speaking. It does not answer when they should be allowed to act, how often they should be allowed to act, or what happens when behavior drifts outside expectations.
In autonomous environments, those unanswered questions are where failures live.
I go deeper into this idea, and the controls designed to address it, in my upcoming book 11 Controls for Zero Trust in AI-to-AI Systems. I recently wrote about why I felt the book needed to exist at all, and how these controls fit together as a system.
If you are interested in securing systems that talk to themselves, that context matters.
You can read the full post here:
https://dev.to/helios_techcomm_552ce9239/why-i-am-writing-11-controls-for-zero-trust-architecture-in-multi-agent-ai-to-ai-systems-124
More to come.
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