Why your boss might soon track the rogue autonomous AI tools running on your laptop
Companies could soon have a much clearer view of the unapproved AI tools employees are running on work devices, as concerns grow over autonomous agents being used without security oversight.
AI agents are increasingly being adopted inside businesses to help with coding, data analysis, sales outreach, automation, and other workplace tasks.
Unlike standard chatbots, these systems can take actions across apps and workflows, use tools, and operate with a level of autonomy that makes them harder to monitor.
For employers, the productivity gains can be massive, according to their point of view. For security teams, though, there’s the issue of whether those tools have been reviewed, approved, or restricted before being allowed to access company systems.
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That concern has now prompted AI security startup Virtue AI to launch Shadow AI, a new extension of its AgentSuite-Blue platform designed to discover and monitor AI agents operating across enterprise environments.
The company says many agents are now running inside laptops, SaaS platforms, developer workflows, browser extensions, and enterprise applications without first being reviewed by security teams.
That leaves organisations unable to say exactly where those agents are active, what permissions they hold, which tools they can control, or whether their behaviour is changing over time.
The risk is not limited to employees using consumer AI tools at work. Virtue AI warns that a vendor-embedded agent could become an access path a company never intended to create, while an over-permissioned agent could access data it was never meant to touch.
An out-of-policy agent could also perform an action that is not properly logged, creating problems if a business later needs to explain what happened to regulators or investigators.
Shadow AI is intended to close that gap by acting as an endpoint-level discovery and monitoring layer built specifically for AI and agentic systems.
Virtue AI says traditional EDR and XDR platforms often treat agents like generic applications, while Shadow AI is designed around how agents plan, act, call tools, and evolve.
As reported by outlets like PR Newswire — Wenbo Guo, Head of Agent Security at Virtue AI, explains: “Across the enterprise, employees are using unapproved agents for things like coding, data analysis, and sales outreach…”
“We built Shadow AI to find them. It surfaces the agents running in your environment, traces their actions, and shows your team what each agent is doing, so you can confidently scale AI across your business.”
The system monitors process activity, network behaviour, and filesystem changes, while creating a record of an agent’s host, user context, tool calls, and action sequence.
It can also show which agents are active, how many devices they are running on, and which company policies have triggered a warning.
Shadow AI runs as a lightweight endpoint collector across Linux, macOS, and Windows and can work alongside security platforms including CrowdStrike Falcon, Microsoft Defender, and ServiceNow Now Assist.