Agent authorization is broken — and authentication passing makes it worse

Anthony Grieco, Cisco’s SVP and chief security and trust officer, did not hesitate when VentureBeat asked whether rogue agent incidents are reaching Cisco’s customer base."A hundred percent. We see them regularly," Grieco told VentureBeat in an exclusive interview at RSAC 2026. "I've heard some that I can't repeat, but they do get to the places of, you know, agents are doing things that they think are the right things to do."The incidents Grieco described follow a consistent pattern: authentication passes, identity checks clear. The agent is exactly who it claims to be. Then it accesses data it was never scoped to touch or takes an action nobody authorized at that level of granularity. The failure is not identity; it's authorization."The business is saying things like, we're gonna have 500