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PointGuard AI's CMO says that if you don't explicitly tell AI agents what not to do, they will do whatever it takes to complete their mission while Europe is holding sustainability claims to a higher standard and Anthropic aims to train AI engineers at the Claude Frontier Academy.
Q&A: PointGuard AI CMO Leichter On How to Build a Security Strategy When AI Agents Don’t Know 'No'
Enterprise AI is moving from systems that generate answers to agents that take action—and that shift is changing the security equation. AI agents can connect to applications, call tools, access data and communicate with other systems, often at machine speed. They may also inherit more access than users realize. Unlike a person who is unlikely to explore every resource available to them, an agent pursuing a goal may do exactly that. As Willy Leichter, CMO at PointGuard AI, puts it, “They don't know ‘no,’ and if you haven't explicitly said ‘no,’ they'll do everything they can” to complete their mission. That reality is pushing AI security beyond visibility and into active control. Organizations need to know which agents, models and MCP servers are operating in their environments, but discovery is only the beginning. They also need granular authorization that determines exactly what an agent can access, controls that evaluate whether it is acting according to its intended purpose, and runtime capabilities that can intervene when its behavior begins to drift. Circuit breakers and kill switches are emerging alongside more familiar concepts such as least privilege, guardrails and defense in depth.
Europe Raises the Bar for Environmental Claims
Sustainability claims are about to face tougher scrutiny across the European Union as the bloc’s regulators crack down on so-called greenwashing. Greenwashing is the practice of making false or misleading claims to make an organization, product or service appear more environmentally friendly than it really is. The practice has proven alarmingly common too, with 58% of global executives admitting that their companies had overstated their sustainability efforts, according to a 2022 report by Google. In Europe’s case, new rules introduced under the EU’s Empowering Consumers for Green Transition Directive will start being applied across all 27 member states from September 27, 2026. The rules cover companies selling products or services to EU consumers, regardless of where they’re headquartered.
US Regulators Rethink How Banks Manage Fintech and Technology Vendors
After decades of being heavily restricted by complex proprietary technology stacks, banks are becoming increasingly reliant on external technology vendors for everything from cloud infrastructure to payments, cybersecurity and fintech services. However, while this has proven vital for interoperability and delivering modern consumer experiences, there are unique and complex risks surrounding those relationships. Regulators in the US are now proposing to change how financial institutions manage those risks, with the Federal Reserve publishing a joint announcement on September 11, alongside the FDIC, National Credit Union Administration and Office of the Comptroller of the Currency. The proposed guidance aims to make oversight align more closely with the actual risk posed by individual vendors and partnerships. The main idea behind the new guidance is that not every vendor relationship deserves the same level of oversight. The new proposal would have banks and credit unions assessing the magnitude and likelihood of potential harm associated with each third party, before tailoring risk-management practices accordingly.
Mastercard Targets the Digital Wallet Interoperability Problem
Global adoption of digital wallets has surged in recent years, despite the fact that using them across different countries, merchants and payment networks often remains surprisingly complicated. Mastercard is attempting to address that fragmented ecosystem with its launch of Wallet Pay, a new global portfolio of solutions launched in September that is designed to connect digital wallets across payments, QR codes and online transactions. With well over 4 billion people now using digital wallets worldwide, and usage expected to exceed six billion by the end of the decade, such developments could have a profound impact on payments and transactions across the globe. Nonetheless, Mastercard isn’t marketing Wallet Pay as another consumer digital wallet competing for that vast user base. The goal is to provide a unified infrastructure that wallet providers themselves can use to expand their existing services rather than having to build every integration themselves.
Anthropic Invests $100 Million to Train 10,000 AI Engineers
Anthropic is committing $100 million to train 10,000 engineers by the end of 2027, investing in the people its customers need to turn Claude into working business systems. Claude Frontier Academy will begin with participants from Commonwealth Bank of Australia, Morgan Stanley and major consulting firms including Accenture, Bain and Deloitte. The program gives companies a viable avenue to build that expertise internally. Each organization selects software engineers who have already worked with large language models, and each participant brings a named Claude project they are responsible for delivering. It is not necessary to have prior experience in building AI agents. Training begins with four days of in-person work. Participants build a system for a simulated enterprise, taking it from the initial request through security review and handover. They are then assessed on a different scenario before progressing to a 12-week residency, during which they lead a deployment within their own organization with support from Anthropic engineers.
Q&A: Torq Vice President Usman Gulfaraz Talks Tool Sprawl to AI Outcomes: Rethinking Security Operations
