The rise of agentic artificial intelligence—systems capable of operating autonomously with minimal human oversight—is reshaping the landscape of global security and governance. Unlike conventional AI that responds to prompts, agentic AI can independently set goals, create plans, and execute multi-step tasks. According to experts at the Special Competitive Studies Project (SCSP), a nonprofit and nonpartisan initiative aimed at strengthening America's long-term competitiveness in AI, this technology is beginning to accelerate its own development. “AI is beginning to help build better AI,” they note, warning that a self-accelerating loop could cause capability growth to far outrun projections.
Ylli Bajraktari, president of SCSP, emphasized the security implications in a recent newsletter: “An agent that can navigate complex bureaucratic systems, identify exploitable vulnerabilities, and act without leaving a clear attribution trail represents a qualitative expansion of adversarial capability.” The United States must recognize that adversaries will deploy agentic AI in areas where governance is weakest, using it for coercion, espionage, and influence operations.
Effective governance of agentic AI, however, does not center on the AI model itself but on the scaffolding built around it, the SCSP experts explained. This scaffolding includes connectors to bridge the model with real-world infrastructure (e.g., email, booking systems, financial platforms), memory for learning and adaptation across interactions, planning capabilities to break large objectives into smaller tasks, permission structures defining system access, and guardrails such as spending limits or human sign-offs. Accountability remains a challenge, with governance falling short in three key ways: responsibility is untraceable when using AI, current frameworks only assess task completion without evaluating safety or harm, and agentic AI builds personal profiles that may accumulate sensitive data beyond what individuals intend.
Despite these challenges, SCSP emphasizes 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 character of the environment in which it operates globally. Visit scsp.ai to learn more about how the United States should pursue effective governance of agentic AI.
