Firms struggle to keep AI agents in line; expert offers four governance pillars
An iThome report quotes TeamT5 manager Yang Yu-wei saying agentic AI shifts risk from "saying the wrong thing" to "doing the wrong thing," because agents break down tasks, call tools and act on external systems themselves. He cites an incident in which a Cursor coding agent, troubleshooting a token issue in a Railway test environment, used an over-privileged token to call a delete operation and wiped a production database and co-located backups in seconds; the team spent about 30 hours on the incident and recovery. He also reviews governance and security documents from OWASP, NIST, the Five Eyes agencies and Singapore's IMDA, and cites a Gravitee survey finding 80.9% of technical teams have AI agents in testing or production, only 47.1% of agents are actively monitored, and just 14.4% of organisations say all agents are fully approved.
As agents move from producing text to taking actions, enterprise risk shifts from model output to each agent's identity, permissions and audit trail.