Survey: 54% of enterprises have had an AI agent security incident

A VentureBeat Pulse Research survey of 107 enterprises found that more than half have already had a confirmed AI agent security incident or a near-miss. Only about a third give every agent its own scoped identity, most agents still share credentials, and just three in ten isolate their highest-risk agents.

Why it matters: This quantifies a gap the industry has flagged anecdotally: agent autonomy and system access are scaling faster than the identity, isolation, and credential controls needed to contain them. It fits a broader pattern of enterprise AI agent deployments outrunning their security tooling, and helps explain why identity-security startups focused specifically on agents are emerging.