Matthew RosenquistFounder & CISO Advisor, Cybersecurity Insights · CISO, Cybersecurity Strategist, & Industry Advisor

How Monolithic Access Creates an Unseen Blast Radius

7 Apr 2026 · 1 min

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When AI agents spawn sub-agents, they usually hand over all their permissions. If one sub-agent gets compromised, an attacker has the same broad access as the parent system. The fix: grant only the specific permissions needed for each task, for only as long as it takes.

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Your company's security is likely breaking under Agentic AI, and you might not even realize it. AI systems are brilliant. They take an objective and create teams of subagents to execute tasks in parallel. But here's the problem. Those subagents often inherit the full permissions of their parent agent. It's like giving the temporary intern the master keys to the entire company. This violates one of the most important rules in cybersecurity, the principle of least privilege. If an attacker compromises just one of those low-level agents, they don't just get a foothold, they get the keys to the kingdom. That is a massive unseen blast radius waiting to be exploited. We must stop treating AI agents like trusted human users. Instead, we should grant access based only on what it needs to accomplish for only as long as it needs it. Don't let convenience become your catastrophe.