Sysdig introduces specialized runtime security for AI agents like Claude Code and Gemini. Secure your agentic workflows with eBPF-powered monitoring.
Why AI Agents Need Runtime Security
Claude Code, Gemini, and similar coding agents do not just suggest snippets. They plan steps, call tools, edit files, run shell commands, and pull in external context. That expanded reach is useful, but it also means a single prompt can trigger a chain of actions that a traditional app security review never saw. Static analysis and model-level guardrails still matter; they do not replace watching what the agent actually does once it is connected to a real environment.
Runtime security sits after the model decides and before damage spreads. It observes process activity, network access, file changes, and privilege use while the agent works. For agentic workflows, that visibility is the difference between catching a bad tool call early and discovering it after a repository, secret store, or production host has already been touched.
What eBPF-Powered Monitoring Brings
Sysdig's specialized runtime security for these agents builds on eBPF-powered monitoring. eBPF lets the kernel report system events with low overhead and without forcing every tool or language runtime to ship its own instrumentation. That fits agent workloads well: they spawn short-lived processes, switch between languages and package managers, and leave a noisy trail of subprocesses that agent-only logs rarely capture cleanly.
In practice, that means you can correlate "the agent said it ran a test" with the real binaries, open sockets, and files that appeared. Specialized coverage for Claude Code and Gemini is about recognizing the patterns those agents use—tool runners, sandboxed command helpers, IDE bridges—so alerts map to agent behavior instead of generic process noise.
Threats That Show Up in Agentic Workflows
- Over-broad tool access: An agent with shell, network, and write permissions can exceed the task the user intended, especially when a prompt is vague or injected.
- Secret and credential exposure: Agents often inherit developer environment variables, cloud credentials, or local config; runtime monitors can flag unexpected reads of sensitive paths or unusual outbound destinations.
- Supply-chain and dependency pulls: Package installs and remote fetches look normal in isolation; continuous monitoring helps when the agent reaches domains or artifacts outside your approved set.
- Persistence and lateral moves: A compromised or misdirected agent might alter startup scripts, add keys, or scan internal services—activity that only runtime telemetry makes obvious.
Putting Monitoring Into Daily Practice
Start by defining what "normal" looks like for each agent role. A code-review agent may need repository read access and limited test execution; a deployment agent may need cloud APIs but not arbitrary internet browse. Encode those boundaries as runtime policies: allow expected binaries and paths, alert on privilege escalation, unexpected outbound hosts, or mass file writes outside the working tree.
Wire alerts into the same channels your team already uses for incident response, and keep agent sessions attributable—who started the run, which workspace, which task. Review false positives quickly so engineers do not learn to ignore the feed. Runtime security for Claude Code, Gemini, and peer agents is not a substitute for least privilege or human approval on high-impact actions; it is the continuous check that those controls still hold while the agent is actively working.