Jiří Vyskočil, Franz Pöschel, Andreas Knüpfercs.AI cs.SE
Agentic AI is a fascinating new tool for software development. It is a huge step forward compared to "conventional" AI assisted coding, which in turn was a considerable breakthrough earlier. AI support through LLMs is a young and very fast-moving field. The "conventional" (non-agentic) flavor became useful and productive in early 2025 (around 18 months ago) and the agentic flavor followed in fall 2025 (approximately 9 months ago). Besides all its benefits and potential, it also carries some fundamental risks for IT security. And the agentic approach added very severe risks while making others much more dangerous. With all the motivation to explore this fascinating new tool we should not ignore the risks but actively address them. We present (I) an assessment of the IT security risks, (II) a concept for mitigating them without breaking its benefits, and (III) an overview about an implementation of our concept. In this very dynamic field this is likely not the final and once-and-for-all answer to the identified issues but still a substantial step forward in responsible usage of Agentic AI for software development. It should also be a contribution to the community to allow early and eager evaluation of the potential of agentic AI for software development without actually suffering from its implied IT security risks.
Afreen Alam, Evgenija Popchanovska, Ana Gjorgjevikj +4cs.SE cs.AI cs.CY
Rapid adoption of large language models (LLMs) in enterprise settings has introduced operational, security, and governance risks. As generative AI applications move from pilot to production, manual harm identification and mitigation are becoming difficult to scale. Although many tools support model evaluation, adversarial testing, runtime guardrails, and observability, the tooling landscape remains fragmented. Tools are typically designed for specific engineering tasks and described in technical terms that do not align with governance frameworks or risk taxonomies, making it difficult to determine which tools address which risks and where critical gaps remain. This paper proposes a structured protocol to automate AI risk mitigation through a taxonomy-driven analysis of open-source LLM evaluation and security tools. We map the capabilities of 21 prominent open-source tools to the 32 subcategories of the extended MIT AI Risk Mitigation and Response Taxonomy. An LLM-assisted retrieval-augmented generation pipeline analyzes source code and documentation to extract capabilities for each taxonomy category. Reliability assessment yielded moderate agreement (Fleiss' Kappa = 0.509) among three independent reviewers. The analysis reveals a highly skewed landscape in which tools cluster around technical and operational controls, while governance, legal and regulatory, and financial and market controls remain largely unaddressed. This motivates a layered risk-mitigation architecture combining tool-based controls with organizational and regulatory processes. The mapping protocol achieved an F1 score of 75.5% after majority voting. Overall, the study provides a practical mapping between enterprise AI risk categories and open-source mitigation capabilities, identifies where human oversight remains necessary, and presents a taxonomy-driven framework applicable to open-source and proprietary solutions.
OpenClaw has rapidly emerged as a transformative artificial intelligence (AI) agent framework, and its ability to autonomously execute complex, multi-step tasks has attracted an ever-growing and diverse user base. However, this capability comes with significant risks. While existing research has made important strides in characterizing these threats, such work is predominantly directed at technically sophisticated audiences. It remains largely inaccessible to non-technical users. This demographic now makes up an increasingly large and underserved portion of the community, yet it is these very users who most urgently need practical and straightforward guidance. In response, we bridge this gap through a series of interconnected efforts designed to lower the risk barrier for non-technical OpenClaw users. First, we identify and categorize seven core risks that OpenClaw users may encounter in daily usage, explaining each in plain language so that non-technical users can readily grasp the nature and potential consequences of these threats. Second, for each identified risk, we distill a set of corresponding defensive strategies into clear and actionable operational steps that are easy to follow. Third, to make protection even easier, we provide a companion OpenClaw Skill that automates key security configurations, enabling users to safeguard their systems with minimal manual intervention. Through this work, we demonstrate that safeguarding against the risks of intelligent agents need not be the exclusive domain of security experts, and that non-technical users can meaningfully participate in reducing these risks through simple, practical actions.