Agent AI is Coming. Are You Ready?
Agent AI is Coming. Are You Ready?
https://thehackernews.com/2026/05/agent-ai-is-coming-are-you-ready.html
Publish Date: 2026-05-20 07:58:00
Source Domain: thehackernews.com
New Industry Data Just Released Suggests Not.
On May 19th, 2026, Orchid Security released the results of our Identity Gap: Snapshot 2026. Among the findings, “identity dark matter” (the unseen, unmanaged elements of identity) now overshadows the visible elements 57% vs. 43%. And it couldn’t have occurred at a worse time, with enterprises embracing Agent AI with both arms (and unfortunately, as Orchid co-founder Robert Wiseman explains, more than one eye closed).
Why the concern, you may ask?
AI agents are shortcut-seekers by design. When given a task, they are trained to find the most efficient way to complete it, with the speed of machines and the creativity of humans. Denied access to a necessary system? Use a hard-coded credential stored in plaintext within the application. Need information they aren’t entitled to read? “Borrow” a credential with higher privilege. Constantly being challenged across many different systems? Grab a broadly accepted token. Truly, Agent AI’s creativity is remarkable. It just cuts both ways.
Just because an AI Agent can find a way to access an application, a system, a database, doesn’t mean that they should do so. But where coding would restrict a traditional nonhuman actor and conscience should give a human pause, in most cases, AI Agents have no such constraints or compunctions.
That’s why well-managed identity and access management is a critical foundation to keeping Agent AI activity within authorized bounds. Look no further than the cloud outages reported at the start of the year to understand this importance.
Of course, IAM shortcuts, gaps, and exceptions have built up over the years. Even decades. So it’s not reasonable to expect everything to be cleaned up at once. That’s why the findings from this year’s Identity Gap Snapshot- the exposures most common across North American and…
