- One simple prompt could lead to swathes of downstream compute, experts warn
- Attackers could even exploit your uncontrolled AI to run up costs
- Greater visibility and circuit breakers are two solutions
Data security company Forcepoint has revealed a major issue with AI agents, but unlike many AI security threats, it doesn’t involve stealing data or compromising the model.
Instead, if left to its own devices, Forcepoint says agentic AI could actually consume excessive amounts of compute, tokens, API calls or other resources if sufficient safeguards and limits aren’t in place, leading to higher-than-anticipated enterprise cloud bills.
Moreover, the company’s research argues that the problem has become more important as AI has become more complex.
Enterprises warned to keep an eye on AI agent compute usage
The result of overwhelmingly complex agentic AI systems is that one single and apparently simply user request could lead to tens or hundreds of downstream operations. Forcepoint labels this as ‘unbound consumption’.
Crucially, the analysis found that high compute and token consumption could actually be pretty hard to detect and existing security protocols are unlikely to pick it up, because there doesn’t even need to be an attacker for the impacts to take place. All you need is a badly configured automation or a long-running AI session to accidentally lead to runaway costs.
However, Forcepoint worries that attackers can indeed step in to exploit this vulnerability, with malicious users generating huge workloads and consuming massive compute for their own benefit after obtaining an enterprise’s credentials, letting them pick up the bill.
Solutions can be as complex as agentic AI itself, but they’re now more necessary than ever. Firstly, companies should set budgets at multiple, finer levels, such as API keys, individual users and teams. They should also have greater monitoring powers over where costs are attributed to.
But Forcepoint also calls for agentic circuit breakers to prevent workload and costs from compounding.
“Security teams rarely watch cloud billing dashboards. Finance rarely reviews prompt patterns or agent design,” security researcher Jyotika Singh wrote in an urge for enterprises to take the risk more seriously.
