Agentic AI adoption raises governance and societal risks

What happened: The Linux Foundation-backed Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF) launched this month to coordinate open standards and neutral governance for autonomous AI agents. Major platform and model companies are among the inaugural participants (PR Newswire, Dec 22; AFP, Dec 23). Shinkai joined as a launch Silver Member on Dec. 22, 2025 (PR Newswire), and Liquid Reply also announced participation (AFP).

Technical context: AAIF identified early projects aimed at standardizing agent interoperability, including Anthropic’s Model Context Protocol (MCP), Block’s goose, and OpenAI’s AGENTS.md. These efforts aim to reduce bespoke integrations and improve composability (PR Newswire). At the same time, enterprise buyers and vendors are expanding AI security capabilities: ServiceNow agreed to acquire Armis for $7.75 billion in cash to increase cyber exposure and device visibility. Armis reported roughly $340M in annual recurring revenue and more than 50% year-over-year growth (MarketWatch; ServiceNow investor release, Dec 23).

Implications: The simultaneous push for open standards and rising security M&A reflects two linked pressures. Operators need interoperable controls for agent behaviors, and CISOs must close visibility and governance gaps as autonomous agents expand attack surfaces. Legal and compliance teams should prioritize agent policies, provenance tracking, and deception mitigation now.

Why It Matters

• Engineering teams: AAIF-aligned standards reduce custom integration work and accelerate safer, composable agent deployments.
• Security and ops: The ServiceNow–Armis deal highlights rising vendor focus on asset discovery and real-time exposure management—prioritize device, IoT, and endpoint visibility.
• Security teams: Add agent behavior monitoring, provenance logging, and deception-detection to inventories, monitoring, and incident playbooks.
• Legal and compliance: Track standards outputs and align internal policies to avoid fragmentation, regulatory gaps, and inconsistent controls.