ServiceNow calls for a measured response to rogue AI agents
SiliconANGLE Jonathan Anthony
ServiceNow says rogue AI agents need more than an off switch. It wants companies to pause, probe, or pull access based on the work the agent does.
Based on reporting by SiliconANGLE, Jonathan Anthony — read the original for the full story.
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ServiceNow wants enterprises to treat a bad AI agent less like a light switch and more like a security and business decision rolled into one. That’s the message Bhakti Pitre, the company’s vice president of AI platform security product, pushed at Okta’s Oktane event during a theCUBE broadcast.
Her point was simple: stopping an agent is not always the right move. If an agent is merely failing to do its job, a pause and investigation may be enough. But if that same agent has been allowed to do something sensitive, the response changes fast. Pitre used a discounting example: an agent cleared to offer 10% off gets prompt injected and starts offering 100% off instead. At that point, she said, the plug needs to be pulled.
That thinking fits ServiceNow’s broader pitch that AI governance should run through five steps: discover, observe, govern, secure and measure. Those steps sit behind its expanded AI Control Tower, and the company wants containment to scale with the level of risk. The key, Pitre argued, is not just acting quickly. It is knowing why an agent should be paused, restricted or cut off.
ServiceNow also says it can connect an agent to the business processes that depend on it, using Veza’s identity security technology to trim excessive permissions. And because no one vendor sees every layer an agent touches, from the endpoint to the network to the gateway, ServiceNow is working with Okta on securing agent session tokens and agent identities. Pitre’s blunt takeaway was that vendors have to cooperate if AI is going to be used broadly across enterprises.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
The industry’s new obsession with a dramatic kill switch is mostly theater. The harder, more useful work is figuring out what an agent was allowed to do in the first place, then narrowing access instead of reaching for the big red button every time something looks odd. Security teams have been living with “least privilege” for years; AI vendors are just discovering the same lesson with better branding.
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