Guardians of the Machine Mind: Securing India's Agentic AI Future

As AI systems evolve from passive assistants to autonomous decision-makers, India's digital economy faces a new frontier of cybersecurity challenges. These “agentic AIs” can reason, plan, and act independently, making them powerful allies, but also unpredictable risks. To safeguard the nation's digital transformation, securing these intelligent agents must become a top national priority

- Saugat Sindhu

India’s digital economy is booming, from UPI payments to Aadhaar-enabled services, from smart manufacturing to AI-powered governance. But as artificial intelligence evolves from passive Large Language Models (LLMs) into autonomous, decision-making agents, the cyber threat landscape is shifting dramatically.

These agentic AI systems can plan, reason, and act independently, interacting with other agents, adapting to changing environments, and making decisions without direct human intervention. While this autonomy can supercharge productivity, it also opens the door to new, high-impact risks that traditional security frameworks aren’t built to handle.

Here are the 10 most critical cyber risks of agentic AI, and the governance strategies to keep them in check.

Memory poisoning

• Threat: Malicious or false data is injected into an AI's short- or long-term memory, corrupting its context and altering decisions.

• Example: An AI agent used by a bank falsely remembers that a loan is approved due to a tampered record, resulting in unauthorised fund disbursement.

• Defence: Validate memory content regularly; isolate memory sessions for sensitive tasks; require strong authentication for memory access; deploy anomaly detection and memory sanitisation routines.

Tool misuse

• Threat: Attackers trick AI agents into abusing integrated tools (APIs, payment gateways, document processors) via deceptive prompts, leading to hijacking.

• Example: An AI-powered HR chatbot is manipulated to send confidential salary data to an external email using a forged request.