Security Considerations for Artificial Intelligence Agents

Perplexity's submission to NIST's request for information on agent security doesn't pull punches: agent architectures break assumptions security teams have relied on for decades, collapsing the line between code and data and blurring who has authority to do what. Written by Ninghui Li, Kaiyuan Zhang, Kyle Polley, and Jerry Ma, it maps the real attack surface — prompt injection, confused-deputy exploits, cascading failures in long-running agent chains — and proposes a layered defense stack rather than a single fix. If your team is deploying agents and hasn't read a security paper yet, this is the one to start with.