AI Agents Are Rewriting the Rules of Lateral Movement

Security teams have spent decades asking whether an identity has too much access. AI agents raise a harder question: how can we determine which paths an autonomous system can discover, given the access it already has?

A person may try several ways to complete a task. A deterministic application follows the flow its developer wrote. But an AI agent is relentless in its pursuit of done. In May 2026, OpenAI announced that one of its models had disproved a 1946 Erdős conjecture in discrete geometry, largely by working through paths a mathematician would abandon as too tedious.