Without adequate governance, agentic AI threatens to autonomously, invisibly and rapidly morph from a business boon into a business disaster.
Sysdig has turned its runtime visibility skills into providing governance to agentic AI. The need is clear: “AI is moving from answering to acting. It used to be chat machines. Now agentic AI does stuff for us,” explains Loris Degioanni, Sysdig founder and CTO.
The problem is it can do more than we tell it, faster than we can control it, and has no sense of morality.
Sysdig has stepped into this space with the announcement of Sysdig AI Defense offering runtime security and governance for AI agents.
“AI has moved from answering to acting, and agents now ship code, change infrastructure, and reach into production systems at a speed no team can review by hand,” warns Sysdig. Unattended, the problem of AI agents going rogue is likely to increase over time: agents are designed with increasing autonomy, complexity and ‘reasoning’ to maximize their undoubted economic benefit. Increasing complexity increases the potential to drift into error.
Sysdig AI Defense sees and monitors every action an agent takes, from its origin to its completion. This is no simple task. Agents can assume new powers very rapidly as they seek to complete their assumed tasks. Every action an agent takes may be logged; but underlying the action, there may be five or more processes visible only to the operating system kernel. These processes could be invisibly adapting the function of the agent.
“The agent deployed in the morning isn’t always the one running in the afternoon,” warns Sysdig; and “only the kernel shows what actually ran.” If safety requires an agent action to be blocked, it must be immediate. “There is a need for solutions that operate at runtime, can operate extremely quickly, and can include response,” explains Degioanni. “For example, any blocking response must happen in real time, in line, as the action happens and before the action completes.” This is the purpose and function of Sysdig AI Defense.
“An agent can misreport a tool call, but it can’t rewrite its interactions with the system or the external world,” said Degioanni. “An agent’s own account of what it did is useful context, but it’s not evidence. When what an agent reports and what its actions show disagree, you have a detection. Watching software in real time and stopping it when it steps out of line is the core of Sysdig’s runtime foundation, and Sysdig AI Defense brings that same truth to the moment an agent acts.”
The firm claims several distinct benefits from its AI Defense product. It provides a live inventory of agents, harnesses, models, MCP servers, skills, and plugins, built from runtime telemetry. Every agent can be traced to an accountable human.
Risky agentic actions can be detected, held for human review or blocked before they can complete. Policy templates can be predefined with rules mapped to frameworks such as the OWASP Top 10 for LLM Applications. Each policy starts in alert mode and is moved into enforcement mode when the organization is ready.
Actions taken by an agent and AI Defense are recorded as they happen. A live action graph shows each step in order, pairing what an agent said it was doing with what it actually did, what it could reach, and whose authority it acted under.
The result is audit quality immutable records showing which policies were applied, when, and who signed off.
Earlier this year, the IBM Institute for Business Value reported on the current state of agentic governance. “As AI agents move from pilots to production, systems make autonomous decisions at volumes no human governance can realistically supervise,” it notes. It also warns that this problem is rapidly worsening. “By 2027, enterprises expect to deploy an average of 1,661 AI agents – a 38% increase from today. At that rate, tech leaders are tasked with managing hundreds of thousands of autonomous decisions daily. And manual governance can’t keep up with that math.”
Sysdig AI Defense is purpose-built to provide automated runtime security and governance for AI agents.
