The Art of (Agent) War - Certiv<br>Back to Blog

Listen<br>1x

1.5x

2x

Around the fifth century BCE, a Chinese general named Sun Tzu began writing about conflict - not about swords or armies, but about the conditions that determine victory and defeat.

His observations were so fundamental that The Art of War is still studied by military leaders, politicians, founders, and executives more than two thousand years later. Because while the weapons of war change, the nature of conflict rarely does.

Every generation eventually finds itself on a new battlefield. A new technology emerges. Old assumptions fail. The speed of conflict accelerates and the old maps become useless.

Those who mistake a new battlefield for an old one often lose before they realize the war has begun. Our generation’s battlefield happens to be inhabited by machines.

Machines that reason, plan, and act on our behalf. They pursue objectives, use tools, make decisions, and increasingly interact with one another with minimal human involvement. They are becoming participants. Actors. Agents.

And like every commander facing a new kind of combatant, our instinct is to reach for the oldest manual we have.

If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles.

It is a good instinct. But it conceals a mistake. One hidden in the very first word.

The Enemy Was Never the Enemy

Sun Tzu assumes an adversary. Someone on the far side of the field, whose defeat is the point. The entire art is organized around an opponent, yet look closely at the agent.

It is acting on your behalf. Pursuing your objectives. Carrying your credentials. It runs inside your perimeter, reads your data, and touches your systems - not because it breached them, but because you invited it in.

The agent is not across the field. It is on your side of it.

Which means the hard half of Sun Tzu’s line was never “know the enemy.” It was “know yourself.” The agent is not an adversary to be defeated. It is a force under your command, closer to a lieutenant than an enemy. And the problem a commander faces with his own forces is not destruction.

It is command.

This is the quiet category error running through most of how we think about agent security today. We keep reaching for the language of war - threats, attacks, defense, denial - because it is the doctrine we inherited. But you do not defeat your own army. You direct it. And an army whose movements are invisible cannot be directed. A lieutenant whose intentions are unknowable cannot be trusted. A force whose actions you cannot see is as much a danger to your own side as to anyone else.

Understanding, not victory, is the first task. Everything else depends on it.

New Weapons for a New Battlefield

Every generation arrives on a new battlefield carrying the weapons of the previous one - and it is almost always a mistake.

We are making it again.

Watch what happens when a security team is handed responsibility for agents. They reach for the tools on the shelf - the EDR platform, the DLP suite, the SIEM. They bolt agent oversight onto CrowdStrike, onto Zscaler, onto whatever was built to defend the network from the outside. These are excellent weapons. They were designed to repel an adversary at the perimeter, at human speed, after the fact.

But the agent is not at the perimeter. It is already inside, holding your keys. The threat model those tools were built for does not describe the situation at all. Pointing them at agents is fighting the new war with the instruments of the last - and worse, with instruments built for an enemy that, in this case, doesn’t exist.

The deeper mismatch is speed. An agent can think, reason, and act in moments. It can take more actions in a minute than a human could meaningfully inspect in an hour. Dashboards, tickets, and after-the-fact investigations are human-speed processes attempting to govern a machine-speed actor. By the time a human reads the alert, the agent has moved on.

To command a machine, we increasingly need another machine.

But if we are to build these new instruments of command - what should they actually do?

The Supreme Art

Our first instinct is to block, deny, and terminate. To treat every uncertain action as a threat to be stopped.

History suggests otherwise. The greatest commanders did not seek victory through endless battles. Every engagement carries a cost. Every conflict introduces uncertainty. Even victory consumes resources. So they sought something more elegant.

The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.

The same lesson applies, sharpened by the fact that the agent is your own force. You do not want to subdue it. You want it to succeed at the right thing, within the right limits.

So the objective is not to destroy the agent. It is to shape its behavior. To guide its decisions. To expand its options when the stakes are low and constrain them when the stakes are high. To ask for confirmation before the irreversible...