Zero Trust for AI Agents

**SPEAKER_1** (0:02)
Welcome to the Practical AI Podcast, where we break down the real world applications of artificial intelligence and how it's shaping the way we live, work and create. Our goal is to help make AI technology practical, productive and accessible to everyone. Whether you're a developer, business leader, or just curious about the tech behind the buzz, you're in the right place.
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**Daniel Whitenack** (0:41)
Welcome to another Practical AI podcast episode. This time, it's just Chris and I, my co-host in these episodes where it's just the two of us. We try to take something that's in AI news or a topic for a deep dive, something that will help all of us level up our AI and machine learning game. I am Daniel Whitenack. I'm CEO at Prediction Guard, and I'm joined as always by my co-host Chris Benson, who is a principal AI and autonomy research engineer. How are you doing, Chris?

**Chris Benson** (1:12)
Hey, doing great. Lots of cool stuff out there. Looking forward to today's conversation.

**Daniel Whitenack** (1:17)
Yes. Yeah, for sure.
There's no shortage of things to talk about, but even in our, I don't know if you remember this passing comment, Chris, but I think it was in our episode where we were talking about MCP on top of Kubernetes, the guest mentioned that, hey, when Anthropic kind of drops one of these white papers or research topics or blog posts, often that's a window into something that's significant and something to pay attention to and review in detail. It just so happens that they on May, I think 27th of this year, 2026, released this, I guess it's an e-book, white paper blog post, however you want to frame it, framework around wisdom.
Yeah, zero trust for AI agents. Say zero trust for AI agents. We share a security framework for deploying autonomous AI agents in the enterprise, covering the new threat landscape, a tiered zero trust architecture and defensive operations built for AI accelerated attacks. So that's a lot of words. Now I think first off, Chris, it's probably worth recognizing that Anthropic obviously has a horse in this race, especially with things like Cloud Code or Cloud Co-Work or all the Cloud things. These are autonomous agents that can operate in your enterprise environment. So obviously, I think probably there are things that are happening and things where their customers or people using these tools are obviously thinking about the security implications of that. They also recently released Cloud Security, which is more on the AI for security side, not so much the security for AI side, which is mostly what we'll talk about today in relation to this article or ebook. But yeah, I think that's worth acknowledging, obviously, if people have a secure way of deploying autonomous agents. I'm sure they are hoping that many of those are built on anthropic technologies.

**Chris Benson** (3:32)
I'm sure they do, and just to keep in the back of our mind, this is the same organization that has Mythos out there and is working with, I believe the latest number is 150 organizations, is the latest thing I saw published on their website, trying to go through and do security audits and such as that. With the timing of this, I would guess, don't know, but just making a guess that some of the leveling up that Mythos has enabled is probably driving some of their zero trust and other security concerns going forward. So looking forward to this.

**Daniel Whitenack** (4:12)
Yeah, I guess that's a good place to start with the kind of premise of this. I think there's a few things to frame here maybe. One is, there is probably a segment of the market and of our audience that is already using autonomous agents for something, even if that's just like Clod Code or something like that for development purposes, where by autonomous, I mean, it's making actions on your behalf to do some things.
And I think generally, in terms of where we're seeing the market going, on the positive side, organizations are going to need to more and more adopt these autonomous agents within their organization for value creation or new revenue or saving on operational efficiencies. So that's like thing, premise one is that that's the way the market's going. I think the other kind of background to this though is like you were saying, there's a bit of a forcing function here because AI, or how should I, so attackers, so malicious parties, hackers, et cetera, have equal, you know, they have equal access to these agentic coding and development capabilities themselves, right? Meaning that the pace at which people are about to be or are already being attacked and exposed to threats in their infrastructure is just like expanding exponentially, which means you cannot keep up with that level of attack using human-only approaches, meaning that the forcing function that I'm talking about is you're necessarily going to have to adopt autonomous agents at least to help you manage the threats associated with the offensive use of this AI technology. So I think there's the positive side of this, obviously, which is there's a future where autonomous agents are doing very positive things, and you have this kind of digital work force of agents within your organization. But maybe part of the forcing function behind this discussion is that people actually need to adopt autonomous agents because of this offensive threat to their infrastructure.