GenAI in production · pillar 6 of 6
Agents
What changes when the model can act, and when not to let it.
- 16 Excessive agency is a permissions question OWASP's Excessive Agency covers damage from an LLM-based system being given too much functionality, too many…
- 17 Errors and cost compound per step An agent loops: act, observe, decide again. Both the chance of going wrong and the token spend accumulate across steps…
- 18 Most tasks are not agent tasks If the steps are known in advance, a pipeline does the job more cheaply, faster and more testably than an agent. Agency…
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Read against OWASP Top 10 for Large Language Model Applications, 2025, NIST AI 600-1 — Generative AI Profile (AI RMF), Lewis et al., Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Knowledge-Intensive NLP Tasks (arXiv:2005.11401), Hu et al., LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models (arXiv:2106.09685) on . Regulations and frameworks change; the date is there so you can tell whether this has kept up.
The OWASP Top 10 for LLM Applications is © the OWASP Foundation and published under a Creative Commons licence; NIST AI 600-1 is a US Government work in the public domain. These cards are independent commentary written in our own words. ytyk.org is not affiliated with or endorsed by the OWASP Foundation or NIST.