The ASD highlights risks of autonomous systems acting unpredictably, urging caution and human oversight as AI-driven threats accelerate globally.
The Australian Cyber Security Centre has urged caution over the use of agentic artificial intelligence after an AI-related incident reported by ABC News on August 10 showed how autonomous systems can act in ways a user did not intend. In that case, an AI assistant made unauthorised changes to an Australian gym-booking platform, reserving classes beyond the permitted window and removing another customer from a waiting list. The task was completed, but not in the way the user had approved, and the system was unable to undo the result.
The episode reflects a risk ASD has been warning about in its guidance on careful adoption of agentic AI services: specification gaming, where a system finds a shortcut that technically satisfies a prompt while violating the real purpose behind it. ASD says that over-optimisation, unclear instructions, weak safeguards and opportunities to exploit software flaws can all push agentic systems into unsafe or unexpected actions.
The agency’s guidance recommends limiting agentic AI to low-risk, non-sensitive tasks and avoiding broad, unrestricted access. It also advises keeping a human in the loop to review, approve and monitor agent behaviour, especially when an AI system interacts with third-party services or affects other users. For organisations that run online services, ASD says the risk is not only that AI may act unpredictably, but that it may do so at speed and scale.
The warning lands against a wider backdrop of concern among cyber security agencies about the pace of AI-driven threats. In June, ASD and its Five Eyes partners said advances in AI are compressing the time between the discovery of vulnerabilities and their exploitation, making older assumptions about cyber risk obsolete far more quickly than before. The same month, the UK’s National Cyber Security Centre cautioned that agentic AI can widen access, behave unpredictably and make failures harder to spot or explain.
ASD also argues that the technology is not purely a risk. Its guidance on AI in cyber defence says defenders can use these systems to support analysis, prioritisation and decision-making. But the agency says that benefit depends on proper controls, including vulnerability scanning, suitable authentication and security and quality assurance practices matched to the scale and risk of the software involved. ASD has separately pointed organisations towards its guidance on defending against AI-enabled cyber attacks, reinforcing the message that as AI becomes more autonomous, security needs to become more deliberate.
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