AI Agents Emerge as the Top Insider Security Risk for Enterprises

AI agents are quickly gaining access to sensitive corporate systems, and security leaders increasingly see that autonomy as a bigger threat than traditional hackers or malicious employees.

New research from Exabeam found that 48% of security leaders consider AI agents operating with excessive, compromised, or unintended access their organization’s greatest current threat. By comparison, 28% selected external attackers, while compromised and malicious insiders each received 12%.

The findings highlight a growing cybersecurity challenge: autonomous AI systems can create significant damage without behaving like conventional malware or demonstrating malicious intent. An agent with legitimate credentials could expose confidential data, exceed its intended permissions, or execute flawed instructions across interconnected systems.

Exabeam commissioned Sapio Research to survey 600 security and finance decision-makers across seven countries for its report, The Agentic Insider: From Monitoring to Understanding. The research focused on goal-driven AI agents capable of accessing enterprise resources and acting with limited human supervision, rather than consumer chatbots.

Most organizations are already attempting to monitor these systems. Sixty percent use dedicated AI security or governance tools, while 56% have extended existing security information and event management, detection, or monitoring platforms. Another 56% use behavioral baselines, but 29% still depend on manual reviews.

The problem is that visibility does not always provide understanding. More than a quarter of respondents identified inadequate behavioral context and correlation as the largest weakness in their monitoring strategy. Security teams also reported problems tracking activity across environments, prioritizing alerts, and managing labor-intensive processes.

“Organizations are making meaningful progress in monitoring AI agents, but monitoring activity isn’t the same as understanding behavior,” said Steve Wilson, Chief AI and Product Officer at Exabeam. “AI agents operate with legitimate access and interact across multiple systems, making individual actions appear routine. Security teams need the context to connect those actions over time so they can distinguish expected automation from misuse, compromise, or unintended behavior.”

The report also exposes a funding obstacle. Although 93% of respondents said security and finance teams agree on cyber risk tolerance, 55% of security leaders had delayed or reduced an initiative because they could not explain the risk in financial terms acceptable to the CFO.

“CFOs rarely question whether a cybersecurity risk is real,” said Mike Byron, Chief Financial Officer at Exabeam. “The challenge is understanding how a proposed investment reduces that risk in measurable business terms. When security teams connect technical outcomes to business impact, investment decisions become much easier.”

As businesses deploy more autonomous agents, monitoring individual actions will not be enough. Defending the agentic enterprise will require connecting identity, behavior, permissions, and business impact before legitimate access turns into an invisible attack path.