Why standards are key to agentic AI security and digital IDs

 

The more artificial intelligence (AI) can do on its own, the more humans must do to keep it on the right track.

As innovation to introduce autonomous AI agents grows in speed and scale, international standards experts aim to ensure that security, trust and digital identity keep pace.

Prompt-injection attacks and identity spoofing are among the key risks to address. But unintended AI behaviours also present a growing danger as autonomous, multi-agentic AI systems enter sectors like financial services, healthcare, and infrastructure management.

Standards experts at the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) are calling for robust controls and global trust frameworks to keep AI agents on the straight and narrow.

Chair of the organization’s expert group for security standards, ITU-T Study Group 17, likens the agentic AI standardization challenge to the earlier development of the Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) model as the basis for hardware and software systems that now support communication networks globally.

Study Group 17 is developing models for proactive cyber defence and innovative approaches to trust, trustworthiness and governance. It is also working on standards to establish secure and accountable digital identities for agentic AI.

“A few months from now, we’re going to see a wave of new solutions based on agentic AI,” says he. “We have absolutely no model to secure that in an interoperable manner.”

He stresses the need for an “entire trust framework,” including an “agentic AI trust control plane” to keep humans in the loop.