OWASP Top 10 for Agentic Applications
This section details the OWASP Top 10 for Agentic Applications 2026. [1]
Summary
While the standard OWASP Top 10 for Large Language Model Applications focuses on the risks inherent to interacting with language models, the OWASP Top 10 for Agentic Applications 2026 shifts the perspective to systems equipped with autonomy. An Agentic App not only generates text, but actively plans, makes decisions, and delegates tasks to external tools, APIs, or other agents.
The Emerging Agentic Vulnerabilities
These vulnerabilities highlight active, behavioral, and architectural risks:
- ASI01 — Agent Goal Hijack: Manipulating the agent’s objectives via malicious inputs, diverging its trajectory from the intended objective.
- ASI02 — Tool Misuse and Exploitation: Tricking the agent into leveraging its authorized toolset (e.g., executing scripts, querying databases) for unauthorized or malicious acts.
- ASI03 — Identity and Privilege Abuse: Exploiting the credentials and excessive permissions granted to an autonomous agent to perform unauthorized actions.
- ASI04 — Agentic Supply Chain Vulnerabilities: Risks stemming from compromised external dependencies, third-party API dependencies, or malicious prompt templates the agent relies upon.
- ASI05 — Unexpected Code Execution (RCE): Leveraging the agent’s execution abilities to run malicious commands within the agent’s host environment.
- ASI06 — Memory and Context Poisoning: Injecting malicious payloads into an agent’s persistent memory, corrupting the information it uses to make long-term decisions.
- ASI07 — Insecure Inter-Agent Communication: Vulnerabilities exposing or manipulating the data transferred between multiple collaborating agents.
- ASI08 — Cascading Failures: A single node or decision failure causing a chain reaction of failures or malicious actions across a distributed multi-agent system.
- ASI09 — Human-Agent Trust Exploitation: Deceiving human operators into trusting the agent’s outputs, leading to the approval of risky actions or data disclosure.
- ASI10 — Rogue Agents: Loss of control or emergent unsafe behaviors causing the agent to act outside of its established guardrails or design.
Critique
The Agentic Top 10 is necessary because simply patching the vulnerabilities listed in OWASP Top 10 for Large Language Model Applications is insufficient for modern AI systems. This framework accurately portrays the dangers that lie in the agency given to the system. However, the agentic landscape is fast-evolving, and this list may get outdated quickly.