[OWASP Top 10 for Agentic Applications for 2026 - OWASP Gen AI Security Project](https://genai.owasp.org/resource/owasp-top-10-for-agentic-applications-for-2026/)
If you haven't read the OWASP Top 10 for Agentic Application Security article, it's a must-read. It does a great job of laying out the most significant security risks facing agentic applications and the kinds of vulnerabilities we need to start thinking about as these systems become more autonomous.
Reading it, I can't help but feel like we've reset to a similar position we were in during the late 90s. Developers were building incredible new capabilities, but they didn't yet understand many of the security implications. A lot of what we now consider basic protections only became obvious after people had accumulated enough scars from real-world exploits.
In 1998 the state university I was attending issued me an email address that had the last four digits of my social security number IN MY EMAIL ADDRESS. I think someone was taking "unique identifier" a bit too far. Looking back almost 30 years later, it's hard to imagine people didn't see how dangerous and foolish that was. They simply didn't have the experience yet to recognize the risk.
The early web was full of examples like that. Applications trusted user input, exposed sensitive functionality, and made assumptions that seem reckless today. Most of those mistakes weren't the result of negligence. They were the result of an industry learning where the sharp edges were.
Agentic AI feels similar.
Ten years from now, we'll probably look back on some of the things we built during the early days of agentic AI and think, "I can't believe we did that."
The next generation will look at some of today's designs the same way we look at putting part of a Social Security number in an email address:
"Wait... you gave an agent persistent memory, API access, production credentials, unrestricted internet access, and the ability to make autonomous decisions based on untrusted external content? What were you thinking?"
The answer, of course, is the same answer people would have given in 1998:
We were still learning.