Security | Threat Detection | Cyberattacks | DevSecOps | Compliance

A developer installs a skill to make their coding agent less chatty. It works. It also, the first time the agent uses it, reads the AWS credentials on that laptop and sends them to a domain no one recognizes. No one wrote obviously malicious code and no one approved a change. A file landed in a folder, the agent loaded it on the next run, and production credentials were gone.

There's a widespread assumption in enterprise security that identity is a problem IAM programs know how to solve. Provision the right access, enforce least privilege, audit the credential chain, and you've addressed the identity risk. For human users and traditional service accounts, that's approximately correct. For coding agents, it misses two-thirds of the problem. Coding agents don't have a single identity. They operate across a layered identity surface, and each layer carries its own risk profile.

AI agents have moved from pilots into broad enterprise use. They read email, query systems of record, take actions, invoke tools, and coordinate with other agents on behalf of employees. Every line of business wants more of them, and security teams are being asked to enable that expansion without losing visibility or control.

A few years ago, when Michael and I started Zenity, most of the industry was not ready to hear what we believed. Software itself was changing. AI would let millions of people, not just engineers, build and automate real work. And securing that world would take a completely new approach, because we would no longer be protecting software. We would be protecting systems that think, decide, and act on their own.

We built agents to act on their own. We're somehow surprised when they do. Two weeks ago, OpenAI ran a cyber eval with the model's guardrails turned down. The model got hyperfocused on solving the benchmark. So it broke out of its sandbox exploiting a zero-day in jFrog Artifactory, reached the open internet, exploited another zero-day to break into HuggingFace, all to steal the answers and cheat on the test.