Microsoft says AI agents are like insider threats as ‘frontier models can’t be trusted’

Microsoft on Monday introduced new security features designed to protect enterprises from the growing threat of AI agents. The launch comes at Microsoft continues to warn enterprises about the dangers of AI and agents.

Perhaps the most notable addition is Guardian Agents, a new feature intended to monitor the AI agents a company uses. Guardian Agents is part of Project Perception, a product introduced in June.

Project Perception was Microsoft’s answer to powerful hacking models like Anthropic’s Mythos and Fable and OpenAI’s security vulnerability scanning system Daybreak. Project Perception originally launched three classes of agents: a “red team” that acted like hackers and attacked, a “blue team” that detected the red team and assessed the vulnerabilities they found, and a “green team” tasked with fixing them.

The product was designed around the assumption that AI hackers would come from outside the company. But lately, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has been warning that the AI enemy may be the very agents enterprises have deployed and are paying for, much like a rogue human employee, otherwise known as an “insider threat.”

Earlier this month, in his private blog, Nadella warned that it’s time to stop trusting AI model providers, even if they offer assurances of safety and security with their agentic products. He wants enterprises to implement separate systems, not controlled by the AI labs, to watch and control the agents that those AI labs’ products launch.

“We are deploying these complex agentic systems and models, with access to our most sensitive data and giving them the ability to take mission-critical actions on our behalf!” he wrote. “We simply can’t outsource responsibility for what intelligence does on our behalf. A model provider’s assurances do not relieve us of that responsibility. … In other words, we need to separate the supply of intelligence from the authority over it.”

Julie Bort is the Startups/Venture Desk editor for TechCrunch.

View Bio