From Spec to Standard: How AARM Became the Conformance Bar for Agent Runtime Security, with Herman Errico (Vanta, AARM))

Herman Errico, Product Manager for Technical Research at Vanta, joins us to discuss AARM (Autonomous Action Runtime Management), the spec he created to define a brand-new security category for agents that take real actions, not just generate text. We get into why the action boundary is the security boundary, why securing the model, prompt, or orchestration layer is the wrong place to enforce, and why a runtime needs five authorization decisions (allow, deny, modify, step-up, and defer) instead of a binary yes or no. Herman also explains why he didn't ship a product but a spec, then donated it from Vanta to the Cloud Security Alliance so the industry can compete on execution instead of marketing, how to reason about which context an agent can trust, and why you must block the action from occurring before it takes place.