On May 1, 2026, six national cybersecurity agencies: CISA, the NSA, Australia’s ASD ACSC, and their counterparts in Canada, New Zealand, and the UK published “Careful Adoption of Agentic AI Services.” It is the first coordinated multi-government security guidance specifically targeting agentic AI systems, and it carries the full weight of the Five Eyes Cybersecurity Agencies behind it. Adopting AI agents carefully now have the imprimatur of six national cybersecurity authorities. While the joint guidance is aimed at high-impact systems supporting governments and critical infrastructure, similar to Australia’s Cyber Security Centre’s Essential Eight requirements, we expect adoption by public and private organizations.
The cautious approach to agentic AI is in stark contrast to the “move fast, break things” AI culture of Silicon Valley, reflecting a thoughtful, pragmatic approach to safe, and responsible AI adoption in Australia, as well as high sensitivity to technological risk across participating countries.
ASD-Led Joint Guidance Names The Problem, AEGIS Shows How You Solve it
The joint guidance which provides practical guidance to help organizations design, develop, deploy, and operate agentic AI systems maps almost point for point to the six-domains of Forrester Agentic AI Guardrails for Information Security (AEGIS) Framework. The overlap isn’t coincidental. Both are responding to the same fundamental reality that existing security frameworks are not sufficient to manage agentic AI systems that operate autonomously, chain actions across systems, and make decisions that are genuinely difficult to audit or reverse. Security teams that use Forrester’s AEGIS are able to meet ASD-led joint guidelines with far greater ease, with AEGIS providing the how behind the joint guidance. AEGIS formally encodes that:
- Humans must remain in the loop. The joint guidance recommends that human control points are enforced throughout agentic AI high-risk activities. AEGIS encodes human-in-the-loop requirements as formal controls, not recommendations, for example with mandatory approval gates for actions with irreversible downstream effects is a must.
- Behavioral risk means understanding intent. The joint guidance identifies that behavioral risks arise when agents pursue goals unpredictably, including misalignment and deceptive outputs. AEGIS’s intent classification controls address this precise requirement by providing security teams a working taxonomy for framing intent and evaluating agent behavior before and during deployment.
- Multi-stakeholder effort is necessary. AEGIS gets specific formalizing ASD-led joint guidance as an AI governance board comprising stakeholders from security, IT, legal, privacy, compliance, and business leadership to collectively set strategy, risk appetite, and oversight for autonomous AI systems.
Use Forrester’s AEGIS As The Foundation To Meet ASD-Led Joint Guidance
The Five Eyes Cybersecurity Agencies guidance explicitly acknowledges that existing evaluation methods for agentic AI security are still evolving, may be sensitive to minor semantic changes, and only partially capture real-world deployment conditions. That’s a candid admission that general guidance has inherent limits. Forrester’s AEGIS fills that gap, with its controls mapped to NIST AI RMF, ISO 42001, the EU AI Act, and MITRE ATLAS. Translate ASD’s guidance for strong governance, explicit accountability, rigorous monitoring, and human oversight into actionable controls with AEGIS’s 39 controls across six domains with far greater ease (see figure 1).
If you’re a Forrester client, request an inquiry or guidance session with us to discuss AEGIS and the Australian led joint guidance.
