Rogue agents are forcing a governance reckoning as enterprises hand over the keys
Governance is moving into the foundations of enterprise AI infrastructure as autonomous agents graduate from experiments to mission-critical work. Companies that spent decades refining controls for human employees now manage a second workforce that has no badge number, no paycheck and no moral compass — and no track record to audit.
That governance gap is dominating security conversations across the private cloud market, where agents are being handed corporate data, application programming interfaces and the ability to act without supervision. But business units are not waiting for information technology teams to catch up, according to Clayton Donley (pictured), vice president and general manager of the Identity Management Security Division at Broadcom Inc.
“We talk to companies every day that are doing mission-critical things very quickly with [AI],” Donley said. “It’s not happening in an environment where we have 50 years of figuring out how to deal with employees and giving them their rights. It’s happening in a brand new world.”
Donley spoke with theCUBE’s John Furrier at VMware Explore 2026, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed agent identity, governance and the controls needed to run autonomous systems safely at scale. (* Disclosure below.)
