The Agentic OODA Loop: How AI and Humans Learn to Defend Together

Last week at the AI Security Summit, something profound happened.

The first cohort of AI Security Engineers in the world earned their certification — a milestone that symbolized not just new skills, but a new mindset.

For decades, security has been about control. Rules, gates, and policies that define what’s safe and what’s not. But the age of Agentic AI — systems that perceive, reason, act, and learn — is forcing us to evolve beyond static defenses.

Defense must become adaptive, intelligent, and symbiotic with the AI systems it protects.

Lessons from fighter pilots on security at machine speed 

In high-stakes air combat, elite pilots rely on the OODA loop: Observe, Orient, Decide, Act. It’s not just a checklist, it’s a philosophy of survival. The pilot who cycles faster, with sharper awareness and smarter adaptation, wins. But the key isn’t just speed; it’s learning faster. Pilots run thousands of simulated scenarios, internalize feedback, and evolve their instincts so that in real danger, the loop becomes almost subconscious.

AI Security now demands the same approach. The defenders of AI-native systems, the new AI Security Engineers, face environments that move at machine speed, with attack surfaces that shift continuously. To survive and secure these systems, security must operate like a fighter pilot perceiving broadly, reasoning deeply, acting decisively, and learning continuously. The OODA loop is no longer just a mental model; it is the blueprint for human + AI collaboration in agentic security.

The agentic loop: Human + AI security

AI-native systems operate in a similar paradigm to the OODA framework, continuously taking in signals, understanding context, acting autonomously, and refining their behavior. Security must evolve to match that with human and AI loops working together.

• Observe (Perceive):
  Gain real-time visibility across code, models, prompts, data flows, and autonomous agents. Captures signals that reveal both current behavior and subtle emerging risks.

• Orient (Reason):
  Offers contextual observations to understand intent, predict where risk may emerge next, and prioritize threats based on potential impact.

• Decide & Act:
  Automatically orchestrate defenses, enforce policies, and remediate threats at machine speed while allowing human oversight where necessary.

• Learn:
  Feed every alert, false positive, and exploit attempt back into the loop. Continuously refine detection, response, and policy models to stay ahead of evolving threats.

This final step, learning, is where human expertise and AI feedback converge. AI Security Engineers don’t just monitor, they train and build defenses that learn alongside the systems they protect.

We’ve already seen this pattern in software development. Tools like GitHub Copilot and Cursor transformed how code is written and applications are built. Developers didn’t adopt AI because it replaced them; they adopted it because it amplified their impact.

The same transformation is now happening in security. Until now, AI security has been a scattered toolchain: scanners here, red team scripts there, spreadsheets everywhere. Each tool acted in isolation, with no orchestration, no feedback loops, no shared context.

Evo brings the AI-driven development paradigm to security. Just as coding assistants perceive, reason, and act, Evo perceives your AI architecture, reasons about risks, and orchestrates security workflows

Instead of security engineers manually chasing threats across dozens of tools, Evo becomes an agentic security orchestrator, working in partnership with human engineers. This is agentic defense at machine speed, with humans in the loop, not in the way.

Evo lets security engineers focus on high-value, strategic work, amplifying their judgment, extending their reach, and applying lessons across systems automatically. It’s the Agentic moment for AI security, where human + AI collaboration becomes the standard for defending agentic systems. It’s time to observe more deeply, learn faster, and act more quickly. With Evo, security engineers will lead the agentic age.

How Evo amplifies the human + AI security partnership

For years, we’ve treated AI as a tool to automate human work. But in security, the future isn’t about automation, it’s about collaboration. The defender of tomorrow is not a person or a machine, but a team, humans and AI working in concert through a new agentic orchestration loop.

That’s exactly what Evo enables. Just as coding assistants perceive, reason, and act in development, Evo perceives your AI architecture, reasons about risks, and orchestrates security workflows. It embodies the OODA mindset: Observe, Orient, Decide, Act. It does it at machine speed with the constantly shifting AI landscape. It reasons across vast attack surfaces, acts autonomously to neutralize threats, and learns continuously from both human engineers and the systems themselves.

To be clear, Evo does not replace the AI Security Engineer. Instead, it elevates their impact, reducing time spent on tactical, repetitive work like scanning models, correlating alerts, or tracking dependencies. This partnership frees engineers to focus on high-value, strategic tasks, extending their reach, accelerating decision-making, and ensuring that lessons learned are applied automatically across systems and teams.

Instead of manually chasing threats across dozens of tools, security engineers now operate alongside an agentic security orchestrator. Evo transforms security from a reactive process into a continuous, collaborative, adaptive system, turning threat modeling, detection, and response into an automated, intelligent, always-on workflow.

It’s the agentic moment for AI security, where human + AI collaboration becomes the standard for defending agentic systems. It’s time to observe more deeply, learn faster, and act more quickly. With Evo, security engineers don’t just keep up with AI; they will lead the agentic age.

The rise of the AI security engineer

AI-native systems don’t operate like traditional software. They perceive, reason, act, and learn. They take actions across APIs and data sources, chain decisions autonomously, and evolve every day. Security, which historically relied on static controls, fixed boundaries, and periodic reviews, simply wasn’t designed for this new world. Agentic AI moves too fast, generates new behaviors, and creates new classes of risk that can't be captured in policy documents or annual penetration tests.

This shift is why a new role has emerged: the AI Security Engineer.

As companies adopt agentic systems, security must transition from static guardrails to adaptive orchestration. The AI Security Engineer ensures that AI systems behave safely, securely, and as intended, even when the system evolves. This role sits at the intersection of AI engineering, platform security, and threat defense. It exists because defending AI-native applications isn’t just about securing code anymore; it’s about securing behaviors.

AI Security Engineers build and maintain threat models that reflect risks that never existed in traditional software, things like prompt injection, model inversion, data poisoning, memory leakage, and agent hijacking. They work side-by-side with AI engineers, MLOps, and platform teams to ensure that adversarial resistance is built into model training, deployment, and inference. They instrument detection and response pipelines that monitor AI behavior in real time, watching for anomalies, adversarial interactions, or unexpected tool access. When something looks wrong, they automate remediation, triggering guardrails, policy changes, or shutting down risky behavior altogether.

Success in this role is defined not by process, but by mindset. AI Security Engineers thrive in ambiguity. They adapt fast. They learn continuously. They combine the creativity of a builder with the skepticism of a red teamer, designing secure architecture and then immediately looking for ways it could fail. They operate with the assumption that adversaries will move at machine speed, so their feedback loops must be even faster. It’s about protecting trust, enabling innovation, and ensuring safety without slowing progress.

At the AI Security Summit, we took a meaningful first step as the first wave of AI Security Engineers came together not just to learn new tactics, but to define a new discipline. They are the defenders of the agentic age, professionals who understand both sides of the equation, the power of AI and the fragility of its defenses. They think like engineers, act like analysts, and adapt like agents. They don’t wait for alerts; they proactively orchestrate responses. They don’t fear autonomy; they secure it. They live by the same principles of today’s fighter pilots: “Observe faster. Learn deeper. Act sooner.”

For years, security has been seen as the team that reacts to change. In the age of AI, security leads it. The rise of the AI Security Engineer represents an opportunity, not a threat. It is a path to career growth, influence, and leadership. AI won’t replace security engineers. It will elevate those who step into this new frontier and take the responsibility of defending systems that think.

The new flight path for AI security 

The OODA loop taught us to think faster. The agentic loop teaches us to learn faster. Together, they form the foundation for adaptive, self-improving defense systems that keep pace with AI innovation. This isn’t theory anymore; it’s happening today, in labs, startups, and enterprises, and in the minds of every newly certified AI Security Engineer.

The world doesn’t need more rules. It needs more learners. Security teams that master the Agentic OODA Loop: observing, reasoning, acting, and continuously learning with AI. Those will be the ones who protect our AI future.

To move beyond awareness and understand how these concepts are being applied in real organizations, explore our research report, Navigating the Agentic AI Security Landscape. It details how enterprises are operationalizing adaptive, AI-driven defense, leveraging the Agentic OODA Loop to stay ahead of evolving threats and keep our AI future safe. 

The next frontier of cybersecurity is not just automated — it’s adaptive, symbiotic, and alive. 

Interested in learning more about Snyk’s Latest Innovations in AI Security? Explore Snyk Labs today.