When people talked about AI, the focus in most places was on things like model quality, speed, context window.
As of today, the topics being discussed have changed a bit.
Now these are the questions being asked more often: What does it have access to? What can it do on its own? What information could it leak?
This is exactly where what’s called agentic AI comes in. It can read email. It can search for files inside a repo. It can check the calendar. It can make API calls.
And this is where the risk begins.
In the Global Cybersecurity Outlook 2026 report, 94 percent of respondents say AI will be the factor that changes cybersecurity the most throughout 2026. 87 percent also say that AI-related vulnerabilities are among the fastest-growing risks.
That’s why it wouldn’t be right to talk about agent security as just a trend. Organizations are seeing a new attack surface.
So what exactly is the problem? Prompt injection. In other words, if a document, email or web content the model reads carries a malicious instruction, the agent processes it as if it were a harmless command.
Then comes the data leak issue. When data coming from the user and the system prompt get mixed together, sensitive information can leak out unintentionally.
There’s also the privilege side. If you give file system and mail access to an agent that’s only supposed to produce a summary, the chain gets unnecessarily long. And the longer it gets, the bigger the margin for error and the attack surface.
The OWASP Top 10 for Agentic Applications 2026 already names these separately. Headings like Tool Misuse, Agent Goal Hijack, Memory & Context Poisoning, Identity & Privilege Abuse look a bit different from the classic web application. Because here the input isn’t just the message the user types. An uploaded PDF is input too. JSON coming from an external tool is input too.
If you see an AI agent, look at these three things first: What can it read? What can it execute? What can it send out? The broader the answer, the bigger the risk.
As for the defense side, these are the things to pay attention to: Least privilege. Logging. Human approval for critical operations. Monitoring tool calls separately. Running tests in places separate from real data.
The model may be very smart, but a single API key connected to the wrong place can break everything.
https://genai.owasp.org/resource/owasp-top-10-for-agentic-applications-for-2026/
https://reports.weforum.org/docs/WEF_Global_Cybersecurity_Outlook_2026.pdf