NEW DELHI, Oct. 17 -- Late on Thursday, India's Computer Emergency Response Team (Cert-In) issued a 'critical' warning against cyber-attacks on public and private technology infrastructure by autonomous, artificially intelligent 'agents', or bots with specific skills. This was India's first official acknowledgement of the threat of AI agents in cybersecurity, coming when the world's biggest AI companies and executives have called to slow the pace of innovation. Mint explains how serious India's AI threat advisory really is, and if it adds fuel to the fire on AI safety.

Cert-In's now-published advisory note CIAD-2026-0049 did not detail the scale of the cyber breaches in the conventional sense. Breaches typically come with a volume of dat...