Scaling Intelligence: The Security Foundations Beneath America’s AI Ambitions Are Cracking
Scaling Intelligence: The Security Foundations Beneath America’s AI Ambitions Are Cracking
Publish Date: 2026-05-18 09:16:00
Source Domain: www.cfr.org
The second crack is identity. Every credential and access control system was built on an unstated premise—that an identity belongs to a person. Nonhuman identities now substantially outnumber human ones, yet the identity layer was never built to verify that an agent’s actions match the intent of the human who dispatched it. In March 2026, an AI agent at Meta posted incorrect guidance to an internal forum without its operator’s approval. A second employee acted on that guidance and posted sensitive data that sat exposed for nearly two hours. The gap is not technical. It is structural in how institutions assign, scope, and verify trust, and it widens with every agent granted credentials designed for people. Governance frameworks for nonhuman identity exist on paper. Deployments are outrunning them.
