By Matt Caulfield,
Publication Date: 2026-10-26 20:00:00
Advanced persistent threats were once the domain of highly skilled and well-funded attackers. Infrastructure teams could realistically deploy “good enough” security to reduce friction in their day-to-day because nation-state techniques demanded budgets, time, and expertise that most attackers did not have. That assumption no longer holds. AI is making sophisticated attack capabilities cheaper, faster, and available to many more adversaries.
The recent Hugging Face incident made that shift tangible. An autonomous AI agent chained ordinary weaknesses across production infrastructure, used overly broad credentials, and moved at a scale no human operator could sustain. When attackers can operate at machine speed, privileged access paths built around standing credentials and disconnected policy become an increasingly dangerous form of trust.
As that threat model changes, identity can no longer stop at the application boundary. It has to follow the people, machines, and AI agents…
