⚡ Quick Summary
OWASP Top 10 for Agentic Applications 2026 is a practitioner-oriented security compass for organizations deploying autonomous AI agents. It adapts the familiar OWASP Top 10 format to agentic systems that plan, delegate, and act across tools, identities, and other agents. The document identifies the ten highest-impact agent-specific risks, from goal hijacking and tool misuse to rogue agents and cascading failures, and translates cutting-edge research and real incidents into actionable mitigations. Its key value lies in reframing classic AI and software security issues through autonomy, delegation, and emergent behavior, making it directly usable for security leaders, architects, and governance teams moving agents from pilots to production.
🧩 What’s Covered
The document introduces the Agentic Top 10 (ASI01–ASI10), each structured with a clear description, common vulnerability patterns, concrete attack scenarios, and prevention guidance. Core risks include Agent Goal Hijack, where attackers manipulate objectives via prompt injection or poisoned inputs; Tool Misuse, where legitimate tools are abused within granted privileges; and Identity & Privilege Abuse, addressing the attribution gap created when agents inherit or delegate credentials without proper scoping.
Supply chain risks are expanded to dynamic, runtime agent ecosystems, covering malicious tools, MCP servers, agent cards, and registries. Unexpected Code Execution (RCE) addresses “vibe coding” and agent-generated code paths that bypass traditional controls. Memory & Context Poisoning focuses on persistent corruption of agent memory, embeddings, and shared context that influences future actions. Insecure Inter-Agent Communication highlights weaknesses in agent-to-agent protocols, discovery, and semantic validation.
Higher-order failures are captured through Cascading Failures, explaining how a single fault propagates across agents and workflows, and Human-Agent Trust Exploitation, which examines how anthropomorphism and authority bias are weaponized against human oversight. The list concludes with Rogue Agents, focusing on behavioral drift, collusion, and self-replication beyond initial compromise.
Appendices provide valuable cross-mappings to the OWASP LLM Top 10, Agentic AI Threats & Mitigations, AIVSS risk scoring, CycloneDX/AIBOM, and Non-Human Identities Top 10. A dedicated incident tracker grounds the framework in real-world exploits from 2025, reinforcing practical relevance.
💡 Why it matters?
Agentic systems fundamentally change the risk profile of AI by introducing autonomy, delegation, and persistence. This document gives organizations a shared language and prioritization framework to reason about those risks before they scale. It bridges engineering, security, and governance by tying technical failures to operational and compliance impact, making it especially relevant for AI Act readiness, internal risk assessments, and board-level discussions about autonomous AI.
❓ What’s Missing
While mitigation guidance is strong, the document stops short of offering maturity models or implementation roadmaps for different organizational sizes. Metrics for measuring residual agentic risk and clearer guidance on aligning ASI risks with regulatory controls (e.g. EU AI Act or ISO 42001) would further strengthen its governance usability.
👥 Best For
Security architects, AI engineers, red teams, and platform owners building or defending agentic systems. Also highly relevant for AI governance, risk, and compliance professionals seeking a concrete threat model for autonomous AI in production environments.
📄 Source Details
OWASP Top 10 for Agentic Applications 2026, OWASP GenAI Security Project – Agentic Security Initiative, Version 2026 (December 2025).
📝 Thanks to
OWASP GenAI Security Project leadership, the Agentic Security Initiative core team, entry leads, and the global community of contributors and reviewers who grounded this work in real-world research and incidents.
