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.

Coding agents have a misconfiguration problem. YOLO mode enabled to reduce approval friction, sandbox enforcement disabled, Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers installed from public marketplaces without security review. These are common configurations in enterprise developer environments, and remediating them is genuinely valuable work. AI Security Posture Management (AISPM) addresses exactly this class of risk, surfacing misconfigurations before they create the conditions for a successful attack.

For the past couple of years, most of the industry’s attention has gone toward agents that respond to a single prompt. They ask a question, get an answer, and move on. Enterprises are now deploying long-horizon agents; autonomous systems that execute extended, multi-step tasks across hours or days, without a human checking in on every step. These agents plan, reason, and improvise their way toward a goal, and that changes what security has to protect against.

• Zenity secures ChatGPT Workspace Agents across their full lifecycle, from posture management at build time to detection and response at runtime. • AgentForger showed how a single link could forge an autonomous AI agent that inherits a real employee's identity and access, a risk legacy security tools can't see. • Zenity's AISPM catches the misconfigurations these attacks rely on, such as agents that auto-approve sensitive actions or connect to privileged systems.

When Hugging Face's security team sat down to reconstruct what had torn through their production infrastructure in mid-July, they had more than 17,000 recorded attacker actions to sort through, spread across a swarm of short-lived sandboxes with decoy activity planted to slow them down. They did what any competent team would do in 2026 and reached for a frontier model to help triage the logs. However, the commercial APIs refused.

Every tool in the enterprise security stack was designed to answer a specific question about a specific threat model.