Zero Trust for Agentic Systems — trust, safety, and security for agents. @mvpzone
The CISO's First Question
A board asks the CISO: we want to deploy AI agents across our operation — what do we need to do? Before the frameworks, before the controls, there is a structural question: are we extending trust to thousands of agents the way we extend it to a handful of vendors? The vendor model — paper contracts, annual reviews — does not scale to that count. The first major failure will reveal the mismatch.
Trust Is a Computation
“Do we trust this agent?” “It’s signed, the supply chain is verified — yes. Approve it.” This makes sense if trust is a property the agent has, like a signature on a passport. It isn’t. Trust is never a property; it is always a computation — re-asked and re-computed for every action, in that action’s specific context, with the evidence available at that moment.
The Six Essentials
A team starts from zero: agents in production, no framework, an executive who wants real progress in 90 days. The comprehensive roadmap is right for the year and wrong for the quarter. The Six Essentials are the floor — a small set of practices that cover roughly 60% of the agentic Zero Trust threat surface, land in one focused sprint, and need no new infrastructure.