AWS’s repeated problems with AI agent controls illustrates the autonomous agent dilemma

What happened

AgentCore issues On September 18, 2026, for example, Palo Alto Networks’ Unit 42 cybersecurity researchers reported an issue “where using default configurations in AWS AgentCore Harness could allow attackers to steer an agent’s actions through prompt injection to exfiltrate plaintext credentials managed by AgentCore Identity.” Throughout this year, Amazon Web Services (AWS) has repeatedly had to patch autonomous agent security holes, which have then reemerged in slightly different forms, according to cybersecurity researchers at Palo Alto Networks’ Unit 42 and at Zenity Labs. Amazon Web Services is a cloud computing company based in Seattle.

But the problem is not with AWS, which seems to be reacting quickly to address security reports, as much as it is with the essential nature of autonomous AI agents and the difficulty in controlling those agents . The fact that a hyperscaler with Amazon’s massive resources can’t seem to get ahead of the problem illustrates the agentic challenge for all enterprise IT and cybersecurity executives.