From guardrails to governance: A CEO's guide for securing agentic systems

A practical blueprint for companies and CEOs that shows how to secure agentic systems by shifting from prompt tinkering to hard controls on identity, tools, and data. The previous article in this series, " Rules fail at the prompt, succeed at the boundary," focused on the first AI-orchestrated espionage campaign and the failure of prompt-level control. This article is the prescription. Across recent AI security guidance from standards bodies, regulators, and major providers, a simple idea keeps repeating: treat agents like powerful, semi-autonomous users, and enforce rules at the boundaries where they touch identity, tools, data, and outputs. These steps help define identity and limit capabilities. Today, agents run under vague, over-privileged service identities.