Agentic artificial intelligence (AI) systems, which can operate autonomously with minimal human oversight, are evolving rapidly, raising significant governance and security concerns. According to experts at the Special Competitive Studies Project (SCSP), a nonprofit and nonpartisan initiative focused on strengthening America's long-term AI competitiveness, these systems can independently set goals, create plans, and execute multi-step tasks. Ylli Bajraktari, president of SCSP, warned in a recent newsletter that a self-accelerating loop in AI capability development could far outrun current projections, creating a qualitative expansion of adversarial capability.
In terms of global security, Bajraktari emphasized that adversaries will likely deploy agentic AI in areas where governance is weakest, using it for coercion, espionage, and influence. Unlike existing AI systems that generate responses based on prompts, agentic AI can navigate complex bureaucratic systems, identify exploitable vulnerabilities, and act without leaving a clear attribution trail. This represents a significant challenge for national security.
Effective governance of agentic AI, according to SCSP, involves not just the AI model itself but the scaffolding built around it. This scaffolding includes connectors to bridge the model to real-world infrastructure like email and financial platforms; memory for learning and adapting across interactions; planning capabilities to break large objectives into smaller tasks; permission structures defining system access; and guardrails determining what the system will refuse to do, such as spending limits or human sign-offs.
Accountability remains a major challenge, with current governance falling short in three key ways: responsibility is untraceable when using AI, current frameworks do not assess whether an AI agent performed a task safely or caused harm, and agentic AI builds personal profiles that may include sensitive data accumulated from patterns of behavior and inferences. Despite these challenges, SCSP experts stress that agentic AI is not a technology to be feared or deferred. Institutions that prioritize understanding, shaping, and governing agentic AI will determine their own competitive position and influence the global environment in which it operates. Visit scsp.ai to learn more about how the United States should pursue effective governance of agentic AI.
