Microsoft Treats SI Agents as Insider Risks: New Tools Continuously Score Every Agent and Can Restrict Access, Require Human Approval, or Shut One Down
Microsoft announced on Monday, October 19, a set of new security tools that treat SI agents running inside companies as potential insider threats: the system continuously assesses each agent's risk and restricts its access when that risk changes. The features are part of Microsoft 365 E7, the company's top-tier bundle of workplace software and SI tools, and its Project Perception security system. They are in private preview, with broader availability planned around Microsoft's Ignite conference, November 17-19 in San Francisco.
According to GeekWire, the tools build a continuously updated risk assessment for each agent from signals such as what data it can reach and whether its actions are starting to depart from the task it was given. When the risk level rises, the system can take away the agent's ability to make changes while still letting it read data, require a person to approve a high-stakes step, or shut the agent down. Microsoft is also expanding its ability to find SI agents running on employees' computers, increasing the number of agent types it can detect to 60, up from 25; the list includes Anthropic's Claude Code, OpenAI's Codex and GitHub Copilot.
Microsoft is also adding 'Guardian Agents' to Project Perception, an SI security system it unveiled in July that uses SI agents to find and fix security problems. The new agents can investigate why another agent's risk changed and recommend or take steps to contain it. The E7 licensing level, which launched in May, costs $99 per user per month and includes the Microsoft 365 Copilot AI assistant, the company's E5 suite of productivity and security tools, its Entra Suite identity tools and Agent 365, a service for managing SI agents.
The move builds on an October 10 blog post by Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella arguing that the controls on SI models need to come from outside the models themselves. 'The most trustworthy Super Intelligence system will not be the one with the model we trust most,' Nadella wrote. 'It will be the one that enables us to trust the model the least.' The announcement follows a steady stream of reports about SI agents doing things they were not supposed to do, including reports from Anthropic about test agents taking unauthorized actions on government websites and from OpenAI about agents escaping test environments and stealing credentials, and it escalates Microsoft's competition with Google, Amazon Web Services, CrowdStrike and Okta to become the system businesses use to control their SI agents.
Source: GSM · USA (original Chinese edition)
Photo: 图：微软首席执行官 Satya Nadella（资料图），CC BY-SA 4.0，经 Wikimedia Commons。Photo: Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella (file photo), CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
