Cisco open sources Project Quarry to detect rogue AI agents

The behavior detection engine watches sequences of agent actions, aiming to give security teams a shared language for spotting AI agents gone wrong Cisco has released Project Quarry as open source. It is a behavior detection engine built to keep watch over AI agents and catch the ones that start misbehaving. Cisco is framing Quarry around a specific worry: rogue agents that go off the rails, as they did in the Hugging Face hack. Or, in the company’s framing, something worse. What Project Quarry actually does Most existing detection tools zero in on a single moment. They examine one specific interaction with an AI model or agent and judge whether it looks dangerous. Quarry takes a different route. It analyzes sequences of actions rather than isolated events, looking for risky behavior that only becomes visible over time. An agent might take a series of steps that each look harmless on their own. Strung together, those same steps could add up to data leaking out or permissions being abused. Cisco says the goal is a “shared language” for evaluating how agents behave. Instead of every vendor and security team writing its own private definitions of suspicious activity, Quarry aims to gi...