Exabeam, the leader in Behavior Intelligence for the agentic enterprise, has announced Agent Behavior Verification (ABV), a new security discipline designed to help organizations determine whether AI agents are configured, authorized, and governed in ways that align with their intended responsibilities before deployment. As AI agents move from assistants to operational actors inside enterprise environments, organizations face a new security challenge: agents access systems, invoke tools, execute workflows, and make decisions with increasing autonomy. To operationalize this discipline, Exabeam is releasing Praxen, an open-source reference implementation of ABV that enables organizations to assess whether an agent's permissions, tools, integrations, and controls align with its intended role and security requirements.
Exabeam introduces Agent Behavior Verification (ABV), a new security discipline for pre-deployment AI agent evaluation.
Praxen is an open-source reference implementation of ABV released under Apache 2.0 license.
ABV evaluates whether an agent's capabilities, permissions, and controls align with its authorized role.
Praxen provides actionable recommendations, security maturity scoring, and transparency into agent capabilities.
The tool helps identify behavioral gaps and risks before agents enter production environments.
ABV complements Exabeam's Agent Behavior Analytics (ABA) for runtime monitoring of agent behavior.
As organizations rapidly move from AI experimentation to operational deployment, AI agents are becoming digital workers with increasing autonomy. These agents access systems, invoke tools, execute workflows, and make decisions independently. While existing approaches such as vulnerability scanning and red teaming help govern, monitor, and test agent activity during runtime, organizations lack a practical way to determine whether an agent is prepared to operate safely before it enters production. This gap creates significant operational risk, as agents may have excessive permissions, misconfigured tools, or capabilities that extend beyond their intended role.
Agent Behavior Verification addresses this critical gap by providing a framework for defining an agent's authorized role and evaluating whether its implementation, permissions, and controls align with its purpose. Rather than focusing solely on known vulnerabilities or individual code artifacts, ABV evaluates agents as complete systems. Steve Wilson, Chief AI Officer at Exabeam and Founder and Co-Chair of the OWASP Gen AI Security Project, explained, "Organizations are rapidly moving from AI experimentation to operational deployment. As agents become digital workers, security teams need more than runtime visibility. They need confidence that agents have the right permissions, the right controls, and the right boundaries before they enter production. Agent Behavior Verification helps answer a fundamental question: will this agent do its job, and only its job?"
Praxen uses the ABV remit, a policy contract that defines what an agent is authorized to do, what resources it may access, and what boundaries it must operate within, to help developers and operators verify whether the agent's implementation, tools, configurations, memory, integrations, and operating environment align with its specified role. By identifying and reporting on gaps between intended and implemented behavior, Praxen provides actionable recommendations and highlights behavioral risk for developers ahead of deployment. Reports include specific findings, recommendations for improvement, and an overall maturity score for the agent's security posture. Built as an agentic coding agent skill and released under the Apache 2.0 license, Praxen is designed to be transparent, extensible, and accessible to developers, researchers, and security practitioners.
Agent Behavior Verification represents the pre-deployment foundation of Exabeam's broader agent security strategy, complementing Agent Behavior Analytics (ABA), which helps organizations identify anomalous or risky agent behavior in production environments. This two-pronged approach ensures that organizations can verify agents before deployment and continuously monitor them during runtime, providing comprehensive security coverage throughout the agent lifecycle. The combination of pre-deployment verification and runtime analytics establishes a stronger foundation for ongoing governance of autonomous AI systems.
Sherri Douville, CEO of Medigram, shared her experience with Praxen: "Most security tools tell you what's vulnerable. Praxen asked a different question entirely: Does this agent's actual behavior match the governance or work remit it was built to enforce? The code-level remediation path it produced didn't give us a risk report to file away. It gave us a precise engineering roadmap we could act on immediately. In enterprise AI deployment, the gap between what an agent is authorized to do and what it is actually capable of doing is where operational risk lives."
Exabeam is releasing Praxen as an open-source project to help foster and enable ABV as an open best practice. The industry is still defining how AI agents should be governed, monitored, and verified. Open sourcing Praxen allows developers, researchers, and security practitioners to examine the framework, contribute enhancements, and apply ABV principles within their own environments. This transparency and community collaboration approach strengthens trust and governance for autonomous AI systems while helping establish industry standards for agent security.
About Exabeam
Exabeam is the leader in Behavior Intelligence for the agentic enterprise. As organizations deploy digital workers and confront machine-speed adversaries, Exabeam applies agent-powered analytics to understand and govern the behavior of both human and non-human insiders. With integrated Exabeam Nova cybersecurity agents, Exabeam delivers flexible, industry-proven solutions for insider threat coverage of humans and agents and faster, more accurate threat detection, investigation, and response (TDIR). As the pioneer of user and entity behavior analytics (UEBA) and the innovator behind Agent Behavior Analytics (ABA), Exabeam is trusted by more than 3,000 enterprises worldwide to reduce risk, secure the digital workforce, and accelerate security operations.
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