High-autonomy agents with broad permissions and unfettered access are a recipe for disaster, and enterprises need to act now before they become the next horror story.
June 2, 2026
Agentic AI adoption is in full swing, but unfortunately for enterprises, completely securing these agents might not be feasible.
That's according to Dennis Xu, research vice president at Gartner, who spoke about the dangers of rogue AI agents during the Gartner Security & Risk Management Summit on Monday. "There's a lot of them coming at us — whether we like it or not, whether we know it or not," he said during his presentation.
Xu discussed some of the recent "horror stories" about AI agents going rogue, including the recent PocketOS incident in which an AI coding agent deleted the company's production database and volume-level backups in just nine seconds. The agent, he emphasized, performed these tasks to be helpful, but it gained access to an API for PocketOS's infrastructure provider, which led to catastrophic results.
