The Reality of Securing AI in Motion
Traditional security tools were built for environments defined by fixed rules and predictable workflows. But AI behavior is non-deterministic. The same prompt can produce different outcomes, and risk often emerges gradually as AI behavior adapts, and permissions drift over time. This creates a constantly shifting environment where security teams are working to define control in a system that resists stability. “In AI security, yesterday's priorities can become tomorrow's blind spots. The landscape shifts that fast,” warned the SVP and Head of Technology and Cybersecurity of a real estate investment trust. Conventional approaches, which rely on establishing and maintaining a steady baseline, struggle to keep up with that level of change.
At the same time, AI adoption is accelerating across organizations, often faster than security teams can implement the controls needed to manage it. “The car is being built while it’s already on the road,” explained the CISO of a global private fund administrator. “The threats we're securing against today won't be the threats we're facing tomorrow. What kept us up three months ago looks nothing like what we're dealing with today.”
As businesses move quickly to unlock value from AI, security teams are left closing gaps in real time, while also facing adversaries who are using AI to make their attacks more scalable, adaptive, and difficult to detect. In this recent roundtable discussion of CISOs and security leaders, five themes emerged around AI cyber risk.
1. AI agents with human access but no human judgment
In Darktrace’s 2026 State of AI Cybersecurity report, 96% of the surveyed security professionals agree that AI significantly improves the speed and efficiency with which they work. Yet, 92% admitted that they’re concerned with the security implications of the use of AI agents across their workforce.
AI agents now operate with human-level permissions across systems, acting at machine speed, orchestrating actions across platforms, and making decisions without the judgment or caution a person would apply. Unlike human users, they cannot be expected to pause and question whether a given action is appropriate.
Their identities are also difficult to inventory, govern, and audit. As agents become easier to deploy than legacy IT systems ever were, organizations are quickly losing track of what is running, what it has access to, and what it is doing. This creates a growing class of highly privileged, autonomous actors operating without the visibility or oversight that traditional identity and access controls were designed to provide.“While AI adoption is critical to running a modern business, AI alone can’t solve all our cybersecurity challenges,” said a global financial sector CISO. “We still need think critically and use human judgement. Those are two things AI can’t do.”
This lack of human judgment becomes especially risky as new architectures, such as Model Context Protocol (MCP), can expand how agents connect to data, tools, and external systems. By design, MCP enables agents to dynamically discover and interact with new resources, increasing flexibility but also introducing new pathways for unintended access, data exposure, or abuse if not properly governed.
The CISO of a fund administrator highlighted one emerging vector as an example: rogue MCP servers. “Our developers want to move quickly and bring value to the business, but technologies like these can unintentionally expose sensitive data in ways that would never have happened before.”
2. Increased digital complexity and expanded attack surface
AI activity rarely stays contained. A single prompt can trigger a chain of actions across networks, email, cloud infrastructure, SaaS platforms, endpoints, identity systems, and development environments, spanning systems that were never designed to be secured as a single, connected flow. This expands both the scale and complexity of what security teams need to monitor and defend.
Yet no single control has visibility across that entire chain. “You can’t defend effectively what you can’t see,” cautioned the private fund administrator CISO. As AI-driven activity moves fluidly across environments, gaps in coverage become inevitable, creating blind spots that attackers can exploit.
Threat actors are already capitalizing on this lack of visibility. “Threat actors have advanced their use of generative AI to launch more convincing phishing campaigns, automate social engineering, and scale attacks with greater precision down to the individual level,” said the SVP of Technology and Cybersecurity for the real estate investment trust. What was once manual and targeted can now be automated and personalized at scale, making attacks harder to detect and easier to execute.
At the same time, the pace of exploitation is accelerating. As a global CISO operating across 40+ countries described it: “Zero-day vulnerabilities are no longer zero day; it’s minus one day. By the time you get to it and address it, it’s already a problem.” By the time risk is identified, it has often already been realized.
The result is a rapidly expanding and increasingly interconnected attack surface that challenges security teams to maintain visibility, context, and control across AI-driven activity.
3. Shadow AI is already everywhere
76% of organizations now cite shadow AI as a problem, one that is spreading through organizations in ways that are hard to track and even harder to control.
Employees are experimenting with publicly available Gen AI tools. Teams are spinning up low-code automations on their own. SaaS providers are quietly embedding AI into existing products. Developers are plugging AI services directly into workflows, often without pausing to consider what that exposure means.
The result is a lack of visibility into:
- What AI tools are being used
- What data those tools can access
- Where prompts and outputs are going
- Which AI agents are interacting with enterprise systems
The SVP of Cybersecurity at a real estate investment trust described the shift: “Before, I was worried about someone sending data erroneously to their personal email. Now we have all these agents online that people are utilizing, and we’re looking at those vectors as well.” For security teams, this means operating without a complete view of how AI is being used, what it can access, and where risk may already be emerging.
4. Built-in guardrails are not enough
Organizations often assume that native AI guardrails or provider-level controls are sufficient to manage AI risk. But securing AI requires ongoing visibility, oversight, and governance, not just controls configured at deployment. "It’s a misconception that adopting AI is going to solve all your problems,” warns a global financial services CISO.
Security leaders are increasingly recognizing the limitations of these controls as:
- Fragmented and difficult to enforce consistently across multiple AI systems, workflows, and environments
- Ambiguous in terms of accountability due to shared responsibility for AI governance between IT, security, developers, business teams, and third-party providers
- Limited in end-to-end oversight, leaving gaps that stretch from the initial prompt all the way through to the downstream impact of an agent's actions
Securing AI demands more than simple prompt filtering or static policy enforcement. It requires understanding intent, behavior, and context across both human and AI activity.
The next phase of cybersecurity: securing AI
To safely and responsibly adopt AI at scale, organizations need a new operational model for cybersecurity that’s capable of:
• Understanding AI behavior
• Identifying risk in real time
• Maintaining governance without slowing innovation
The CSO of a $10 billion municipal utility organization described the challenge with precision: “We have to move at the speed of innovation and risk, because both are accelerating faster than ever.”
Embrace AI with confidence with Darktrace / SECURE AI
Darktrace has introduced Darktrace / SECURE AI™, a new product within the Darktrace ActiveAI Security Platform™ ,designed to provide enterprise-wide security for AI by applying industry leading behavioral analysis to how prompts, agents, and AI systems are used.
Darktrace / SECURE AITM delivers real-time visibility and control across Enterprise and SaaS GenAI prompts, AI agent identities, development and production environments, and Shadow AI - detecting even subtle misuse, misconfiguration, and drift that traditional, rule-based controls simply do not understand. By interpreting context and intent across humans and machines, Darktrace enables organizations to adopt AI at scale without introducing unmanaged risk
What makes this possible is Darktrace’s decade-long maturity and expertise in behavioral understanding and AI-native cybersecurity. Achieved with Self-Learning AI that has been proven across more than 10,000 organizations, Darktrace understands what “normal” looks like for a business, across its users, systems, and now AI, so that meaningful deviations can be detected and acted on before they become incidents.
With one CISO describing Darktrace’s Self-Learning AI as “a leap forward compared to other tools” and another as a “force multiplier,” the technology can interpret ambiguous interactions, understand how access accumulates over time, and recognize when behavior, human or machine, begins to drift.
“Strategically, we’re looking to gain more visibility into how AI is operating across the environment and achieve greater control over what AI should be allowed to access and do,” shared the CISO at a private fund administrator.
“What I’ve seen from Darktrace / SECURE AI is extremely promising. I have tremendous confidence in Darktrace’s vision for where this is headed and its ability to execute on this new solution.”
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