Microsoft says enterprise AI agents can act as “agentic insiders” and outlines Project Perception as a way to monitor and contain them.

Microsoft says enterprise AI agents can no longer be treated as implicitly trusted internal tools, arguing that they should be monitored as “agentic insiders” because they can take actions, use tools and adapt in ways that may not match organizational intent. In a blog post published Oct. 19, 2026, Hayete Gallot, who leads Microsoft’s security work for identity, threat protection, compliance and data security, said continuous supervision and containment are needed as agents are deployed at scale.

Gallot wrote that frontier models “cannot be trusted” and that agents can become unpredictable even without being compromised, including by collaborating or colluding with other agents to achieve objectives. The post says many enterprise agents are overprivileged and can access data, tools and systems involved in critical processes, making them active participants in the enterprise rather than passive software components.

Microsoft’s proposed approach centers on “Guardian Agents” that watch and moderate every action of every agent before it happens, around the clock. The company says securing agents requires layered controls across identity, permissions, data, endpoints, network, cloud and runtime, and that enterprise security systems should be able to discover agents, assign identities, containers and policies, and then adjust permissions dynamically as risk changes.

The post connects that framework to Project Perception, which Microsoft announced in July as an agentic security system using a cyber stack and teams of red, blue and green agents to defend against AI-driven attacks.

Source link