A reported campaign involving autonomous AI agents targeting online retailers illustrates how quickly a high-level objective can decompose into many consequential subordinate actions: discovery, exploitation, persistence, application changes, data collection, exfiltration and cleanup.
The enterprise lesson extends beyond malicious use. A legitimate autonomous agent can also invent new actions as it pursues an objective.
Plans cannot manufacture authority
Authority over the objective cannot automatically authorize every action the planner decides would be useful.
Authrizd should enforce Plan-Decomposition Authority Conservation: decomposition can divide existing authority but cannot create new authority.
Every consequential subordinate effect must remain inside the parent mandate or trigger revalidation.
The same problem appears in software development
A coding agent asked to fix an issue might decide that modifying a workflow, changing a deployment configuration or accessing another repository would make the task easier.
Technical usefulness is not authority.
Autonomy can expand the plan. It cannot expand the mandate.
Sources
https://gbhackers.com/autonomous-ai-agents-hack-online-retailers/
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