Identity and permissions aren’t enough to govern AI agent behavior

Presented by Box Identity and permissions are no longer enough to secure enterprise AI agents. They govern what an agent can reach, not how it behaves once it starts working on its own, and an autonomous agent can turn legitimate access of enterprise data into unintended action in seconds. That gap is pushing enterprise AI security from just governing access toward a layered approach that includes governing execution, says Heather Ceylan, chief information security officer at Box. "Access controls and permissions are the foundation, but the challenge is they were designed for humans," Ceylan says. "Permissions are still the foundation, but you have to think about how the agents get their permissions scoped as well." Access controls were built for a slower, more forgiving world, where a human employee with lingering permissions to a decade-old folder will rarely go looking for any data inside it, or even remember they have access at all. But an agent will explore all of its permissions, operating at a scale no person can match and surfacing forgotten misconfigurations and stale permissions far faster than a human ever could. Identity and scoped permissions remain the first layer of any credible defense, however, because agents raise the stakes, clean access hygiene is more valuable than ever. A steady drip of incidents in recent months underlines the potential for major damage, where models have slipped the sandboxes they were supposed to stay contained within , reached systems they weren't scoped to touch, or read content they were not permitted to access. While the specifics vary, the overarching threat remains the same: an agent found a path through the data that it could reach, and took it. Access controls alone can't secure autonomous AI agents Complications crop up

Presented by Box Identity and permissions are no longer enough to secure enterprise AI agents. They govern what an agent can reach, not how it behaves once it starts working on its own, and an autonomous agent can turn legitimate access of enterprise data into unintended action in seconds. That gap is pushing enterprise AI security from just governing access toward a layered approach that includes governing execution, says Heather Ceylan, chief information security officer at Box. "Access controls and permissions are the foundation, but the challenge is they were designed for humans," Ceylan says. "Permissions are still the foundation, but you have to think about how the agents get their permissions scoped as well." Access controls were built for a slower, more forgiving world, where a human employee with lingering permissions to a decade-old folder will rarely go looking for any data inside it, or even remember they have access at all. But an agent will explore all of its permissions, operating at a scale no person can match and surfacing forgotten misconfigurations and stale permissions far faster than a human ever could. Identity and scoped permissions remain the first layer of any credible defense, however, because agents raise the stakes, clean access hygiene is more valuable than ever. A steady drip of incidents in recent months underlines the potential for major damage, where models have slipped the sandboxes they were supposed to stay contained within , reached systems they weren't scoped to touch, or read content they were not permitted to access. While the specifics vary, the overarching threat remains the same: an agent found a path through the data that it could reach, and took it. Access controls alone can't secure autonomous AI agents Complications crop up