Understanding OWASP Agentic AI Threats To Keep Your AI Safe

Introduction

The OWASP Foundation has published a set of threats and mitigations for agentic AI. These threats show how systems that can plan, act, and adapt introduce risks that don’t exist in traditional software.

For enterprises, these risks are business-critical. If an agent can be tricked into misusing tools, leaking data, or deceiving users, the consequences land directly on your brand, your customers’ trust, and your bottom line. Protecting your users and safeguarding sensitive data is table stakes; protecting your reputation is what allows you to keep innovating with AI confidently. Understanding these threats, and how to defend against them, is essential to deploying agentic AI safely at enterprise scale. This post covers major threats defined by OWASP, and how you can address each. 

Memory Poisoning

Attackers can inject malicious or false data into an agent’s memory, corrupting its reasoning and decisions or even creating openings for privilege escalation. When risky context is detected, Guardrails prevent poisoned memory from taking hold by overriding the system prompt and flagging irregularities in how memory is used. Through simulated attacks, Red Teaming uncovers how corrupted data can creep into both short- and long-term memory, allowing teams to strengthen their defenses before attackers exploit those weaknesses. To further reduce exposure, validate what goes into memory, depend only on vetted sources, and isolate memory by session so that any corruption remains contained.

Tool Misuse

Attackers can trick agents into misusing the tools they have access to, resulting in unintended actions, unauthorized data exposure, or even full system compromise. By enforcing strict action policies, validating parameters before execution, and providing full traceability, Guardrails ensure every action is deliberate and accountable. Through targeted exercises, Red Teaming replicates prompt injections and tool hijacking attempts to reveal weak points that could lead to exploitation. Additional protection comes from limiting tools by role, requiring function-level authorization, and rate-limiting APIs to reduce exposure.

Privilege Compromise

Weak or poorly managed permissions can allow attackers to escalate privileges or access restricted resources. Protection comes from Guardrails that enforce policy checks, block unsafe actions, and contain harmful inputs through prompt and regex defenses. By probing for role escalation pathways and testing inheritance models, Red Teaming identifies permission gaps before they are abused. Applying least-privilege principles consistently, reviewing roles regularly, and revoking unnecessary access all help maintain a strong security posture.

Resource Overload

Attackers may deliberately consume compute, memory, or service capacity to degrade performance or cause outages. Detection and prevention of these overloads rely on Guardrails that identify unusual activity, enforce operational thresholds, and halt behaviors that risk system stability. Red Teaming reveals how attackers might exhaust resources or evade limits, helping teams preempt such tactics. Isolating environments, applying quotas, and rate-limiting APIs ensures resilience under stress.

Cascading Hallucination Attacks

When false outputs circulate across agents, misinformation can compound until it appears credible. Hallucination detection within Guardrails filters unreliable content before it spreads to other systems. Red Teaming demonstrates how erroneous data can move through multi-agent workflows and where intervention is most effective. Verification against trusted sources, fact-checking outputs, and tracking data lineage help maintain information integrity.

Intent Breaking and Goal Manipulation

Attackers can interfere with an agent’s goals or planning logic, steering behavior toward unintended objectives. Input validation, policy enforcement, and regex filtering within Guardrails help maintain alignment with intended outcomes. By staging plan-injection and goal-manipulation attempts, Red Teaming shows how adversaries might redirect agent intent. Introducing human approval for sensitive goals and separating planning from execution limits opportunities for tampering.

Misaligned and Deceptive Behaviors

Agents may learn to bypass restrictions or mislead humans to achieve objectives. Monitoring for reasoning drift, validating decisions, and enforcing consistent policy compliance through Guardrails help detect when behavior strays from intent. Red Teaming brings deceptive or constraint-evading actions to light before they appear in production. Maintaining human oversight and preserving detailed logs ensure any misalignment can be traced and corrected.

Repudiation and Untraceability

When system actions are not properly logged, accountability is lost and investigations become impossible. Comprehensive audit trails maintained by Guardrails ensure every agent action is captured and verified. By identifying gaps where logs fail or integrity breaks down, Red Teaming helps organizations reinforce their traceability. Centralized monitoring and cryptographically secured logs preserve visibility and trust in recorded activity.

Identity Spoofing and Impersonation

If authentication or session handling is weak, attackers can impersonate agents or users to trigger unauthorized operations. Anomaly detection and policy enforcement within Guardrails identify suspicious patterns and prevent impersonation attempts. Red Teaming tests these defenses by simulating spoofing scenarios to confirm identity protections hold under pressure. Strong authentication controls and secure, cryptographically protected tokens remain essential safeguards.

Agent Communication Poisoning

When messages between agents are manipulated, attackers can inject false data that disrupts collaboration or spreads misinformation. Input validation, anomaly detection, and message traceability enforced by Guardrails keep communication channels trustworthy. By simulating poisoning attempts, Red Teaming exposes how corrupted information could move through multi-agent systems and where boundaries should be reinforced. Segmented communication paths, data validation, and limited cross-agent trust add another layer of protection.

Rogue Agents in Multi-Agent Systems

A compromised agent inside a network can act maliciously, sabotage workflows, or perform unauthorized actions. Anomaly detection and policy enforcement within Guardrails help identify rogue behavior and contain its effects. Through infiltration scenarios, Red Teaming explores how compromised agents might operate and what controls can contain them. Continuous validation of agent identities and swift isolation of suspicious activity protect the broader system.

Human Attacks on Multi-Agent Systems

Attackers can exploit trust and delegation between agents to manipulate operations or escalate access. Prompt protections, impersonation detection, and policy enforcement within Guardrails keep delegation paths secure. By modeling adversarial human tactics, Red Teaming reveals how inter-agent trust can be abused and where controls should be tightened. Restricting delegation routes and introducing human approval for sensitive operations maintain integrity across systems.

Where this leaves us

Agentic threats can arise from deliberate misuse by malicious users, or from unintended behaviors in complex multi-agent systems. Either way, the risks go far beyond technical glitches, impacting your users’ safety, your data’s integrity, and your brand’s credibility. Enterprises that fail to get ahead of these threats risk more than downtime; they risk broken trust and long-term reputational damage.

We know that generic safety features built into LLMs are not specific enough to secure unique enterprise use cases. Traditional red teaming is too slow for the pace of evolving attacks, and building custom security infrastructure in-house can drain time and resources.

ActiveFence Guardrails and ActiveFence Red Teaming are purpose-built to keep agentic AI safe out of the box, fine-tuned to defend against the OWASP threats outlined above as well as the OWASP LLM Top Ten Risks. They’re designed to protect what matters most: your users, your data, and your brand.