Security | Threat Detection | Cyberattacks | DevSecOps | Compliance

AI Agent Security is quickly becoming one of the most important areas in cybersecurity. Terms like "agent," "harness," "MCP," "tool calls," "tool responses," "instruction hijacking," "indirect prompt injection," "prompt exfiltration," and "tool misuse" are appearing in conference talks, vendor announcements, podcasts, and industry discussions, often without clear explanations.

The regulatory landscape for agentic AI is moving faster than most compliance programs are tracking. CISOs who wait for final guidance before building their compliance posture will find themselves in catch-up mode at exactly the wrong moment and, in some cases, already behind.

A few weeks ago, the U.S. government issued a directive requiring Anthropic to suspend access to two of its frontier AI models, Fable 5 and Mythos 5, citing concerns about a reported jailbreak technique. Anthropic complied, even while publicly disputing whether the finding warranted such a dramatic response. I'm not here to relitigate that specific decision. But the incident forced a question our industry has been dancing around for too long.

The next government security challenge isn’t AI models, it’s AI agents. Zenity and Carahsoft are helping agencies prepare. Across government agencies, AI agents are already interacting with sensitive data, mission-critical workflows, and public services. Yet most organizations still lack visibility into where these agents are deployed, what they can access, and how they behave once operational. The result is a growing governance gap between AI adoption and AI security.

Adversaries are using AI to attack with unprecedented speed and precision. This trend, coupled with the rapidly growing use of agentic AI, means it is now necessary to use AI to protect and defend the modern tech stack. It is timely that on June 2, 2026, President Trump signed Executive Order 14409 on Promoting Advanced Artificial Intelligence Innovation and Security. At a high level, this EO validates that security is fundamental to reaping the benefits of AI.