New global research from Illumio reveals that 70 percent of organisations now delegate human decisions to AI, yet only 49 percent can fully audit its actions. With three-quarters experiencing AI-related security issues, experts urge businesses to implement strict access limits using Zero Trust to contain potential risks.
Published today in Licensed to Act: How AI Autonomy Is Outrunning the Limits Placed on It, the research finds that 70% of organizations now delegate decisions and actions that required human approval a year ago, yet only 49% can see and audit every action taken by an AI agent. The findings expose an emerging control gap between the authority organizations give AI and their ability to audit and constrain its actions.
This is no longer a theoretical risk. More than three-quarters of organizations (76%) experienced at least one AI-related security issue or warning sign in the past 12 months. While much of the AI security debate has focused on how attackers might use the technology, the findings also reveal risks emerging from organizations’ own AI systems as they gain access to enterprise applications, data, and infrastructure.
More than a third of organizations (35%) say AI made a recommendation that would have created a security risk if followed, and 26% have had an AI agent or tool connect to systems without security approval. Twenty-four percent say AI accessed data it should not have reached, while the same proportion report that AI produced or triggered an unauthorized action. Unlike an external attacker that must first break into an environment, an organization’s own AI may already have the credentials and connectivity needed to reach critical systems and data.
The stakes are particularly high as AI gains authority within the security function itself. Sixty-seven percent of organizations use AI within cybersecurity operations, while 32% are comfortable letting AI run security investigations without human review. Twenty-nine percent are comfortable allowing AI to deploy code changes unsupervised, and 26% say the same about granting or revoking access permissions.
Other key findings include:
- Organizations are accepting more risk to unlock AI value: More than half of organizations (56%) say they are willing to accept more cyber risk than they were 12 months ago. Among that group, over half permit autonomous AI actions in non-production environments, and 47% permit them in production environments.
- Enforceable limits remain lower security priorities: Eighty-two percent say AI agents require fundamentally different security controls than traditional software, and 69% agree that limiting what AI can access matters more than predicting every threat. But the controls that define and enforce those limits remain lower priorities: only 25% name explicitly defined permitted actions as one of their two main controls, and just 27% say frontier AI has made network segmentation or microsegmentation more important.
“The biggest AI risk may not be a system that breaks its rules. It may be one that was never given meaningful limits in the first place,” said Raghu Nandakumara, VP of Industry Strategy at Illumio. “AI agents are highly persistent in pursuing a goal, so trying to anticipate every action is a losing battle. Businesses must set strict limits on what they can access and do, then enforce those limits within the application and across the underlying infrastructure. That is how you contain unexpected behavior before it causes real damage.”
As AI moves from an adviser that recommends actions to an operator given growing authority to take them, the research points to one practical response: limit what AI can reach through Zero Trust, rather than trying to predict everything it might do.
