Everyone compares Agentic AI to SkyNet and HAL. Jurassic Park is the better analogy. Creatures that operate in packs test the fences systematically, containment the engineers were certain would hold, and a room full of people so preoccupied with whether or not they could that they didn’t stop to think if they should. They may not eat us, but the chances of enslavement is high.
IBM said it clearly in 1979: a computer can never be held accountable, therefore a computer must never make a management decision. In 2026, we give those computers production credentials, customer data, and the ability to execute at machine speed,without solving the accountability problem first.
This is about what that means architecturally. Chatbots are wrong and humans decide what to do about it. Agents are wrong and then act on it. Behavior-level guardrails don’t survive contact with inference costs. Safety lives outside the model – in eight specific controls: scoped identity, data classification, IAM that enforces the laws, one-way doors that require human hands, and tamper-evident audit of everything the agent touches.
We have decades of experience with how we give an EA access to an executive’s life. And the entertainment industry is rife with stories of managers taking advantage of celebs by gaining access to their bank accounts and other aspects of their lives. All of this has made me realize that:
GenAI Threat management is just Insider Threat management, but faster and at scale.
