Agent Risk Management: Managing Delegated Autonomy Over Time Something that has always amused me in technology is that we keep re-discovering old risk problems and then branding them as new. We did it with distributed systems, cloud, microservices and data platforms. We are now doing it again with AI agents. The vocabulary is new, the demos are impressive, and some of the failure modes are genuinely different, but the underlying management problem is familiar: how do you let a complex system do useful work inside a complex organisation without pretending you can predict every interaction upfront? ...
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Agent Identity is Not One Problem In a previous post I argued that a lot of the trouble in AI governance comes from everyone using the same words to mean different things. Identity is another one of those words, and it is quietly being overloaded in exactly the same way. This one has been bothering me for a long time, from well before agents. When a bank talks about a customer’s identity, it means at least two different things that it usually keeps carefully apart. There is the identity in the directory: the account, the login, the credential, the permissions. And there is the legal identity behind it: the passport, the national ID number, the actual person a court can hold responsible. In banking these are handled by different machinery. The directory does authentication and authorisation. A separate KYC programme does the work of tying that directory record to a real legal person. They are related, but they are not the same thing, and mature institutions do not pretend they are. ...
Clarifying Risk Management concepts: so you can clarify your architecture and processes Something that keeps coming up in conversations about AI, security and governance is that everyone is using the same words, but not always to mean the same things. One person says “compliance” and means security controls. Another says “governance” and means an approval committee. Someone else says “governance” and means policy-as-code in CI/CD. A regulator might say “risk management” and mean a whole organisational system of accountability, challenge, evidence and remediation. An engineer might hear “risk management” and think about threat models, evals, access control, logging and deployment gates. Quite often products list compliance or governance as one of their features, but its a very narrow view or only refers the products internal certification/testing. ...