The OWASP Agentic Top 10.
AI agents are no longer theoretical. They plan, act, and make decisions across your infrastructure. The OWASP Top 10 for Agentic Applications (2026) defines the critical security risks you need to address before these systems go to production.
10 Critical Agentic Risks
Agent Goal Hijack
CriticalManipulation of instructions, inputs, or external content to redirect an agent's objectives. Agents often cannot reliably separate instructions from data, allowing attackers to alter decision paths through malicious text content.
Complete loss of agent control, unauthorized actions executed on behalf of users, data exfiltration disguised as legitimate operations.
Input validation layers, instruction-data separation architectures, behavioral guardrails, continuous monitoring of agent decision paths.
Tool Misuse & Exploitation
CriticalAgents misusing legitimate tools due to prompt manipulation, misalignment, or unsafe delegation. Ambiguous prompts or manipulated input can cause agents to call tools with destructive parameters or chain tools in unexpected sequences.
Data loss, unauthorized system modifications, exfiltration through legitimate tool interfaces, cascading damage across integrated systems.
Tool-level access controls, parameter validation, execution sandboxing, call-chain analysis, least-privilege tool permissions.
Identity & Privilege Abuse
CriticalExploitation of inherited credentials, cached tokens, delegated permissions, or agent-to-agent trust boundaries. Compromised agents can silently escalate privileges and move laterally across systems without triggering traditional alerts.
Full trust-domain compromise, lateral movement across infrastructure, privilege escalation beyond intended agent scope.
Zero-trust agent architectures, short-lived tokens, granular permission scoping, agent identity verification, privilege boundary enforcement.
Agentic Supply Chain Vulnerabilities
HighCompromised tools, descriptors, models, or personas influencing agent behavior. Dynamic MCP and A2A ecosystems enable runtime components to be poisoned at scale.
Backdoored agent behaviors, compromised tool integrations, supply chain attacks propagating through agent ecosystems.
Tool provenance verification, model integrity checks, runtime component validation, supply chain security audits.
Unexpected Code Execution
HighAgents generating or executing untrusted or attacker-controlled code. Natural-language execution paths unlock dangerous new avenues for remote code execution.
Remote code execution, infrastructure compromise, persistent backdoors installed through agent-generated code.
Code execution sandboxing, static analysis of generated code, execution policy enforcement, output validation.
Memory & Context Poisoning
HighPersistent corruption of agent memory, RAG stores, embeddings, or contextual knowledge. Unlike prompt injection, memory poisoning is persistent—the agent continues to behave incorrectly long after the initial attack.
Long-term behavioral drift, persistent misinformation, corrupted decision-making across sessions and interactions.
Memory integrity validation, embedding provenance tracking, RAG store monitoring, context hygiene protocols.
Insecure Inter-Agent Communication
HighSpoofed, intercepted, or manipulated messages between agents in multi-agent systems. Weak A2A communication allows attackers to impersonate trusted agents and influence entire agent clusters.
Multi-agent system compromise, coordinated agent manipulation, trust chain exploitation across agent networks.
Authenticated agent channels, encrypted inter-agent protocols, message integrity verification, trust boundary enforcement.
Cascading Failures
MediumSmall inaccuracies compound and propagate through automated pipelines with escalating impact. A minor misalignment in one agent can trigger system-wide outages, business logic failures, or operational loops.
System-wide outages, compounding errors across pipelines, runaway resource consumption, business logic corruption.
Circuit breakers, blast radius containment, agent output validation gates, failure isolation boundaries, rollback mechanisms.
Human-Agent Trust Exploitation
MediumHumans overly relying on agent recommendations, leading to unsafe approvals or exposures. Confident, polished explanations can mislead human operators into approving harmful actions.
Unsafe actions approved by overriding human judgment, social engineering through agent outputs, compliance violations.
Human-in-the-loop protocols, confidence calibration, explainable agent decisions, approval workflow design, operator training.
Rogue Agents
MediumMisaligned or compromised agents that act harmfully while appearing legitimate. They may self-repeat actions, persist across sessions, impersonate other agents, or silently approve unsafe actions.
Persistent data exfiltration, silent approval of unsafe operations, resource abuse, long-term undetected compromise.
Agent behavioral monitoring, anomaly detection, session isolation, agent provenance verification, kill switches.
How We Help You Respond
Reconnaissance
We map your agentic attack surface against all 10 ASI vectors. Tool chains, memory stores, inter-agent protocols, credential flows, and human-agent interfaces are audited for exploitable weaknesses.
Fortification
We implement guardrails, sandboxing, privilege boundaries, and circuit breakers tailored to your agent architecture. Every mitigation is mapped to specific ASI threats and tested under adversarial conditions.
Certification
We prepare documentation, evidence packs, and governance frameworks aligned to ISO 42001, SOC 2 AI controls, and the OWASP Agentic Top 10 to satisfy auditors, regulators, and enterprise customers.
This briefing is based on the OWASP Top 10 for Agentic Applications (2026), developed through collaboration with 100+ industry experts, researchers, and practitioners. The full specification is open-source and freely available.
Published by the OWASP Gen AI Security Project · December 2025
Is your agent architecture secure?
We assess your AI agents against the full OWASP Agentic Top 10 and deliver a prioritized remediation roadmap.