1.5 million AI agents are at risk of going rogue

A survey of large firms in the US and UK finds that more than half of the deployed agents are not actively monitored or secured.

A study released Wednesday by API management platform vendor Gravitee indicates that upwards of half of the three million agents currently in use by organizations in the US and UK “are ungoverned and at the risk of going rogue.”

Based on a December 2025 survey of 750 IT executives and practitioners conducted by Opinion Matters, the results revealed that AI agents are being deployed faster than security teams can keep up. There are, said Rory Blundell, CEO of Gravitee, now over three million AI agents operating within corporations, which he described as a workforce larger than the entire global employee count at Walmart.

David Shipley, head of Canadian-based security awareness training firm Beauceron Security, said, “the only thing that shocks me is that people think it’s only 53% of agents that aren’t monitored. It’s higher.”

He likened the results from the Gravitee study to a “lesson about the Titanic that everyone in technology keeps ignoring. The Titanic disaster didn’t happen because they didn’t know there would be icebergs on the trip. They knew it was peak iceberg season, they knew they were going too fast.” 

Shipley said that the ship’s captain and his crew “thought they’d detect [an iceberg]; if they didn’t, and hit one, that their technology controls would protect them to help them recover.” They put their faith in the so-called watertight compartments that, it turned out, weren’t watertight at the top, but, most importantly, they trusted the new wireless communications technology that they could use to call for help if they got in trouble. The equivalent today: “Well, IT and security can fix it if we get in trouble with our agents.”

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