What Agentic AI Means for Security and Risk in 2026

Download your complimentary copy of the Gartner® Predicts 2026: Evolving Threats and AI Adoption Transform Infrastructure Security report to learn how agentic AI is transforming work and introducing new security risks.

As autonomous AI agents take on repeatable tasks, they create new attack surfaces that bypass traditional controls. Gartner warns that fragmented security stacks reduce visibility across discovery, access, posture, and data protection, while AI-driven threats increase the risk of privilege escalation, lateral movement, and targeted ransomware attacks.

Gartner recommends starting now with pilot deployments of agentic AI security tools, improving visibility into third-party AI usage, and strengthening application security for custom AI models. It also highlights the need to consolidate security platforms and adopt workspace immutable secure endpoint (WISE) strategies to protect AI-enabled environments, reduce risk, and meet evolving governance requirements.

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Gartner Predicts 2026: Evolving Threats and AI Adoption Transform Infrastructure Security, Deepak Mishra, Franz Hinner, John Watts 3 December 2025

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