Attackers already use AI to probe systems at any hour. AI agents let your team defend at the same pace. A defensive agent watches advisories and inventories, investigates what it finds, ranks the exposure, prepares the fix, carries out the steps you have approved in advance, and checks that the work held. Your security staff spend their time on the few decisions that need human judgment instead of the gathering, matching, and follow-up around them.
The agent carries the loop from finding to verified result. Permission checks sit in the connected systems, not in the model.
Choose the job you need today
- You need a first defensive agent. Start with defensive AI agents. Tell the agent which exposure to reduce. It drafts its own job brief from your inventory and policies for you to approve, then runs a small pilot you can spot-check.
- You have forgotten systems that still run. Use AI to find, fix, and retire legacy systems. The agent reconciles repositories, deployments, scheduled jobs, and live credentials, then ranks and prepares the patch, replace, or retire work.
- You depend on software or services with sensitive access. Work through software supply chain security with AI. The agent checks every release against its expected source and maps what each component could reach if compromised.
- A supplier says your provider keys may be exposed. Follow exposed AI API key response. The agent traces every consumer, stages replacements, verifies recovery application by application, and keeps watching usage.
- An agent is already working overnight. Review continuous defensive operation. Learn how to confirm what the agent covered, what it fixed, and what still needs a person.
For a first pilot, read the introductory guide, choose the workflow that matches your exposure, then use the operating guide before widening coverage. An urgent credential incident needs containment under your incident policy now; it should not wait for an agent pilot.
Let the agent carry the work, and keep people on the decisions
Most defensive work is investigation and follow-through: matching versions against advisories, tracing which systems use a credential, drafting a fix, rerunning a check after the change, and chasing an unanswered escalation. Much of the groundwork is administrative, and an agent can do that too: building and updating the inventory, finding an owner for each system, drafting job briefs and response rules, keeping records, and preparing the operating review. Your operator gives the direction, the agent does the work continuously, and it keeps a complete record as it goes.
People stay responsible for a short list of decisions: what the agent is allowed to do, changes to production that fall outside an approved policy, containment choices during an incident, and accepting that an exposure is closed. Each guide names those decisions, shows what the agent prepares for them, and shows what it does on its own.
Each guide also includes a fictional worked example and the record format the agent keeps. The agent keeps unknowns visible: an asset it could not check stays unverified, and an application that has not run since a key change stays unconfirmed.
Set the agent's authority before it acts
Give the agent a dedicated identity, scoped permissions, spending limits, and a stop control, all enforced by the connected systems rather than by instructions to the model. Within that authority it acts without waiting. Anything outside it becomes a prepared request to an accountable person. Before you rely on the boundary, have the agent attempt one denied action as well as the permitted ones, and confirm that the systems blocked it.
The Governance learning path explains the general ownership and review model. Use permissions and boundaries and the security review checklist to review the defensive agent itself. Agent integration covers connecting agents to the systems that supply evidence and carry out actions.
In AgentShelf
These are workflows a team configures with approved context and tools, a named owner, and controls in the connected systems. See trust boundaries and governance and cost controls, or request agents to discuss the first defensive job.