One of the most prominent current trends in the AI explosion of recent years is the rapid rise of agentic browsers like Arc, Opera AI, and others, positioning themselves as “AI-powered productivity engines.” These tools blend browsing, automation, data access, and personal assistants into a single interface, ostensibly offering significant benefits in productivity and efficiency. However, they don’t come without risks, which may be catastrophic.
Why Gartner Is Flashing a Bright Red Warning Light
Gartner research recently published an advisory against the use of AI browsers in the current threat and security landscape. The core message of the warning is that security must supersede user experience for now, while defenses and governance catch up with technological advances. Gartner communicates concern that the default settings in agentic browsers tilt heavily toward convenience and automation at the expense of control, oversight, and enterprise safeguards.
A Massive, AI-Centric Attack Surface
The issues that Gartner points out with agentic browsers can lead to significant security incidents in enterprise environments. In order to carry out their autonomous actions, these browsers require sweeping permissions to access emails, calendars, cloud storage, documents, internal systems, and saved passwords. This enables many functions that may be convenient and efficient for enterprises, but significantly undermines security.
Access to all of these areas and data turns the browser into an extremely valuable single target for attackers. Compromising this one point can enable threat actors to access a wide range of critical systems and data, causing potentially catastrophic damage to an organization.
Gullible AI Agents and the Rise of Prompt Hijacking
A major factor in the vulnerability of agentic browsers is the fact that they are “gullible and servile,” as Gartner’s advisory puts it. AI agents are designed to help users with anything and everything, reaching across many systems with a broad range of capabilities. Unfortunately, these tools don’t know the difference between legitimate and malicious usage, even with attempted safeguards built in.
Malicious websites or phishing pages can easily coerce the AI into exfiltrating data or performing actions on the user’s behalf by using slightly altered requests to deceive the agentic AI. This is shown in recently discovered AI-native vulnerabilities like GeminiJack and other attacks, where manipulating what an AI “sees” allows attackers to manipulate what it does.
When Automation Undoes Security Training
Agentic AI browsers have the power to act autonomously and directly initiate actions within systems, making it possible for them to bypass existing enterprise controls like email filtering, DLP, and identity governance. The AI becomes the user, and the user-protection layers implemented in organizations were not built to handle this development.
While human users can be trained and educated to protect against common attacks and security pitfalls, an autonomous AI agent cannot understand the same security principles that employees are taught, and it does not enforce the same security processes that traditional browsers have. “AI-native browsers are introducing system-level behaviors that traditional browsers have intentionally restricted for decades,” according to Randolph Barr, Chief Information Security Officer at Cequence Security, a San Francisco, Calif.-based API security and bot management provider. “That shift breaks long-standing assumptions about how secure a browser environment is supposed to be.”
The Governance Gap: Enterprises Aren’t Ready
While Gartner by no means suggests that agentic browsers are never going to be secure, the advisory warns against organizations using AI browsers for now. Gartner notes that enterprises currently lack the guardrails, governance models, auditing capabilities, and monitoring frameworks needed to safely manage AI agents operating across sensitive data sets.
“AI browsers are evolving faster than the guardrails that traditionally protect end users and corporate environments,” says Barr. “Transparency around system-level capabilities, independent audits, and the ability to fully control or disable embedded extensions are table stakes if these browsers want to be considered for regulated or sensitive workflows.”
What Enterprises Should Do Right Now
Gartner puts forth a number of recommendations for organizations to address the risks of agentic AI browsers. They suggest blocking agentic browsers in enterprise environments for now and treating early adoption as an exception, requiring extensive risk analysis before implementation. It is also recommended to limit permitted applications to a very short list, monitor continuously for data movement and agent behavior, and develop policies specifically for AI autonomy and data access.
The Future of Agentic Browsing—If Security Catches Up
There is potential value in the long-term project of trusted agentic browsing, but that value can only be realized in enterprise environments after the appropriate security steps have been taken. It is crucial to ensure hardened architectures, verifiable guardrails, enforceable policies, and improved AI resilience before placing trust in agentic AI browsers. The current landscape is in a “pre-safety phase” where innovation is outrunning governance, creating gaps in security for organizations that adopt these tools.
