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Phantom Labs Research Shows AI Agents Are Acting Beyond Intent. BeyondTrust AI Agent Security, Now Available, Stops Them

globenewswire.com
BYND The article announces the general availability of BeyondTrust's AI Agent Security, a new product designed to address the growing risks associated with AI agents. This indicates a positive development and market expansion for the company, positioning them as a leader in AI security.

Phantom Labs Research Shows AI Agents Are Acting Beyond Intent. BeyondTrust AI Agent Security, Now Available, Stops Them ATLANTA, Oct. 21, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- BeyondTrust, the global leader in privilege-centric identity security protecting Paths to Privilege™ for human, machine, and agentic identities, today announced the general availability of AI Agent Security on the BeyondTrust Pathfinder Platform, alongside new research from BeyondTrust Phantom Labs ® revealing the scale of AI agent activity and the expanding connections these agents introduce across enterprise endpoints.

Drawing on endpoint telemetry from our True Privilege ® Graph, Phantom Labs research revealed:

BeyondTrust’s newest release, AI Agent Security, addresses these challenges by distinguishing AI agent activity from human activity and enforcing what agents are permitted to do at runtime, before unauthorized actions occur, without restricting the permissions employees need to perform their jobs.

“AI agents are increasingly acting on behalf of employees, often with the same access as the humans using them,” said Marc Maiffret, CTO, BeyondTrust. “That dramatically expands who and what can exercise privilege, and when those agents operate autonomously and at machine speed, organizations need to control that privilege before an action is taken. AI Agent Security separates what the human is permitted to do from what the AI agent is permitted to do, so organizations can embrace the power of AI without assuming that everything a human is permitted to do should also be permitted for their AI agent.”

Controlling AI Agents Before They Act

AI Agent Security applies BeyondTrust’s Visibility, Intelligence, and Protection framework to agentic AI on the endpoint, giving security teams the context and control to govern AI agents without limiting the access employees need to do their jobs. Rather than relying solely on blocking known commands or detecting risky behavior after it occurs, BeyondTrust evaluates individual AI agent actions against policy at runtime to determine what an AI agent is permitted to do before an action is taken.

“AI agents fundamentally change the security equation. These are not just applications accessing data; they can make decisions, invoke tools, take actions, and exercise delegated authority at machine speed,” said David Morimanno, Field CTO, Xalient. “That forces security to shift from simply managing access to continuously managing trust. The question is no longer just, ‘Does this identity have access?’ It is, ‘Do we trust this agent to take this action, with this level of authority, in this context, right now?’ BeyondTrust AI Agent Security helps bring that trust decision and enforcement closer to the endpoint, giving organizations a way to govern AI-driven actions in real time without slowing down AI adoption.”

AI Agent Security is Generally Available Now

AI Agent Security is generally available today on the BeyondTrust Pathfinder Platform for Windows and macOS endpoints. Co-developed by Phantom Labs and the team behind BeyondTrust Endpoint Privilege Management (EPM), AI Agent Security extends BeyondTrust’s proven endpoint privilege enforcement capabilities to a new class of non-human identities, bringing AI agent visibility and guardrails into the same platform organizations use to understand and secure privilege across their environment.

Research Methodology

BeyondTrust Phantom Labs ® analyzed endpoint telemetry from AI coding-agent activity against early customer samples, including shell command requests. MCP findings reflect observed coding-agent users on Windows and macOS and include locally configured and plugin-added servers. Shell command figures represent agent-requested commands, not necessarily successful executions.

About BeyondTrust

BeyondTrust is the global leader in privilege-centric identity security protecting Paths to Privilege™. Identity alone doesn’t create risk. Privilege does. As human, machine, and AI agent identities explode across every environment, BeyondTrust is the only company built to discover, control, and secure privilege across all of them from a single platform. Trusted by 20,000+ customers, including 75 of the Fortune 100, and recognized as a multi-category leader by top industry analysts, BeyondTrust reframes identity security from a management problem into a strategic advantage.

Learn more at www.beyondtrust.com.

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BeyondTrust Public Relations

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