Autonomous AI has moved out of the lab and into everyday business operations. Agents now summarize thousands of documents, operate critical workflows, execute code on demand, make API calls and trigger downstream automations — often without human oversight. With this shift, the security community has been anticipating one major milestone, the release of the OWASP Top 10 for Agentic AI Applications.
The milestone has finally arrived.
The new OWASP list signals a clear turning point. We’re no longer dealing with static LLMs that answer questions. We’re dealing with agents capable of perception, reasoning and autonomous action. And while organizations have been racing to adopt these new capabilities, the security landscape is shifting even faster.
Today, the average enterprise faces a staggering 82:1 machine-to-human identity ratio. Every one of those machine identities — agents, tools, datasets, APIs and the orchestration pipelines gluing them together — represents a potential point of compromise. Add autonomous decision-making into the mix, and the surface area expands dramatically.
For CIOs and CISOs, the shift introduces more than technical risk. It creates a governance challenge unlike anything seen before. When agents make decisions, call tools and handle sensitive data without human oversight, traditional security models simply can’t guarantee control. The fear is no longer “What if an LLM says something wrong?” but “What if an agent does something wrong?”
The governance problem isn’t theoretical. Boards are already asking how organizations will prove control over autonomous systems that can access sensitive data, invoke tools and trigger automated workflows.
The OWASP Top 10 for Agentic AI has arrived at exactly the right moment: when organizations are trying to innovate but need a framework to secure the next generation of AI systems. In today’s post, we’ll break down what some of these new risks mean in practice and how Prisma® AIRSTM helps organizations apply the OWASP guidance to secure real-world agentic AI deployments.
Why Agentic AI Demands a New Approach
Traditional cloud and application security tools were never designed for autonomous agents. The agentic ecosystem introduces four simultaneous challenges:
- Agents act rather than just generate text, executing real-world actions that must be continuously monitored and authorized.
- Agents chain tools dynamically, often selecting APIs, plugins and services on the fly — making static policy enforcement insufficient.
- Agents retain memory and context, which can be manipulated through poisoned prompts or compromised RAG data.
- Agents improvise in ways that bypass rigid, rule-based security controls, without centralized behavioral oversight.
OWASP’s new list acknowledges this reality. Security teams must shift from protecting static applications to securing living and adaptive self-directed systems with continuous visibility and control across agents, tools, data and identities.
While Palo Alto Networks provides mitigation coverage across all 10 OWASP Agentic AI risks, the table below highlights four representative examples to illustrate how organizations can interpret them and apply practical mitigation strategies.
4 OWASP Agentic AI Risk Examples and Practical Mitigation Approaches
| Risk | What It Means | Palo Alto Networks Mitigation Capabilities |
| ASI02 – Tool Misuse & Exploitation | Agents use legitimate tools in unsafe or unintended ways due to ambiguous prompts or injection. Example: An invoice-processing agent is tricked into using its email tool to send sensitive documents externally. |
|
| ASI03 – Identity & Privilege Abuse | Agents inherit human or cached credentials and escalate privileges. Example: A customer-support agent reuses an admin token from a prior workflow to access restricted HR data. |
|
| ASI04 – Agentic Supply Chain Vulnerabilities | Agents dynamically load tools, plugins, prompts or models at runtime: A single tampered dependency compromises the workflow. Example: An agent pulls a malicious package from a public repo, giving attackers internal execution. |
|
| ASI06 – Memory & Context Injection | Attackers poison memory, RAG data or session context, and steer agent behavior. Example: A malicious update inserted into a RAG dataset manipulates financial summaries or causes data leakage. |
|
These examples underscore a broader truth. Mitigating agentic AI risk requires coordinated controls across areas such as visibility, identity, data, supply chain and runtime behavior, all of which are addressed in the four steps below.
4 Steps to Address the New Agentic AI Normal
Agentic AI doesn’t require replacing your security program, but it does require modernizing it. The following foundational capabilities align directly with the OWASP Top 10 for Agentic AI.
These foundational capabilities give organizations faster investigation, governance that scales with experimentation, fewer production incidents and safer enterprise-wide adoption.
1. Comprehensive Visibility
Unify visibility across agents, tools, datasets, models and identities so security teams can uncover blind spots and establish a defensible baseline.
2. Agent-Centric Inventory & Context
Maintain an inventory enriched with behavior, permissions, memory use and data access, which enables rapid identification of misconfigurations, overprivileged agents and risky workflows.
3. Supply Chain Integrity Across AI Components
Continuously verify the integrity of prompts, plugins, RAG datasets, orchestration scripts and model dependencies to prevent tampering and dependency abuse.
4. Governance, Guardrails and Active Runtime Control
Apply least privilege, policy enforcement and real-time monitoring to ensure that agents behave safely from development through production.
How Prisma AIRS Helps
Prisma AIRS™ AI Agent Security helps organizations put the OWASP Top 10 for Agentic AI into practice with real visibility and real control. It begins by automatically discovering AI agents across SaaS, custom-built, cloud application development pipelines and third-party environments, giving security teams a clear picture of where agents exist. This supports OWASP risks tied to hidden components and unchecked dependencies, such as Agentic Supply Chain Vulnerabilities (ASI04).
Once agents are visible, Prisma AIRS continuously monitors how they behave — which tools they use, what data they access, and how their permissions change over time. Continuous monitoring helps detect and prevent Tool Misuse & Exploitation (ASI02) and Identity & Privilege Abuse (ASI03) before they turn into incidents.
What’s more, Prisma AIRS AI Runtime SecurityTM can inspect RAG data context and tool schema for evidence of poisoning (ASI06), including attempts to hijack the agent's goal to perform malicious behavior (ASI01).
Prisma AIRS is the most comprehensive platform that unifies discovery, identity, datapath control, supply chain verification and runtime behavior — the full agent lifecycle. With Prisma AIRS organizations have a practical, scalable solution to secure agentic AI inline with the OWASP framework.
Next Steps
The release of the OWASP Top 10 for Agentic Applications 2026 is a crucial moment for the industry. Autonomous agents are accelerating innovation — and introducing entirely new classes of risk tied to data, identity, supply chain and runtime behavior.
Organizations that embrace a comprehensive, visibility-first approach — one that identifies agents, maps dependencies, protects RAG data, governs tool access and enforces runtime controls — will be positioned to safely harness the next wave of autonomous AI.
This is the new normal for AI security.
Now, with the OWASP framework as a shared industry standard — and with modern agentic security platforms such as Prisma AIRS and Cortex Cloud AI-SPM — organizations have a clear, actionable path to secure autonomous AI at scale.
Agentic AI is not a future risk. It’s already embedded in SaaS apps, internal automations and developer workflows today. The organizations that modernize now will define the industry standard for safe autonomous operations.
If your organization is building or consuming agentic AI today, this is the moment to move from awareness to action. Here are the recommended next steps:
1. For a hands-on assessment of your Agentic AI Security posture, contact Palo Alto Networks to evaluate your agent landscape.
3. To learn more about how to protect against the OWASP Agentic threats, download our latest AI Agent Security datasheet.
4. Dive into Prisma AIRS 2.0 to see the latest advancements in AI discovery, posture management, agent security, and runtime protection.