Intent-Aware Protection for AI Agents

AI agents increasingly access enterprise data, invoke powerful tools, and act with limited human oversight. Existing security defenses primarily detect prompt injection, harmful outputs, or suspicious behavior, but do not determine whether an agent remains faithful to the purpose for which it was deployed. An action may contain no attack pattern and stay within granted permissions while still violating the agent's role, organizational constraints, or purpose. We introduce Intent- Aware Security, a framework that treats trusted agent intent as a first-class security object. We define Intent Preservation and Intent Drift, and operationalize them through an Intent Profile: an agent-specific representation extracted from organizational, role, and developer intent. We further introduce an Intent-Aware benchmark of 887 validated samples across 35 agents, built by a generation procedure that fixes ground-truth labels before LLM realization, and four Intent Profile-based protections: pre-execution detection, post-execution detection, input alignment, and system-prompt hardening. Across all evaluations, Intent Profile-based protection outperforms all profile-free baselines on the primary metric. On our benchmark, it raises four-class acro-F1 from 45% to 79% (Out-of-Scope F1 from 8% to 76%). On more than 10,000 executed AgentDojo trajectories, where ground truth comes from environment state, profile-based post-execution detection reaches 0.949 AUROC versus AlignmentCheck 0.909, 0.897 with raw agent configuration and 0.843 without context. Profile-based input alignment improves protection success by 7 points over DataFilter with a comparable benign utility. These results suggest that an agent's intended purpose can serve as a useful security reference for detecting and mitigating deviations from its deployed role and operational boundaries.