Beyond Zero: Enterprise Security for the AI Era

Computer Science > Cryptography and Security [Submitted on 21 May 2026] Beyond Zero: Enterprise Security for the AI Era Joseph Valente, Michal Zalewski The rise of autonomous AI agents and the accelerating velocity of corporate data access are stretching the application-centric model of zero trust security to its breaking point. This paper introduces Beyond Zero, a new security paradigm designed for the AI era. The Beyond Zero architecture performs per-resource and method access decisions for humans and agents at machine speed. By shrinking the trust boundary from the application level to the individual action, and by coupling static authorization guarantees with dynamic, AI-driven reasoning, Beyond Zero enables a self-defending enterprise capable of mediating thousands of human and machine decisions per second. This paper outlines Google's vision for the future of this access model as well a call for industry collaboration and standards development. Comments: This is a preprint and this paper has been accepted for publication in ACM Queue. The final version of this paper may change through the editorial process Subjects: Cryptography and Security (cs.CR) Cite as: arXiv:2605.22985 [cs.CR]   (or arXiv:2605.22985v1 [cs.CR] for this version)   https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2605.22985 Focus to learn more Submission history From: Joseph Valente [view email] [v1] Thu, 21 May 2026 19:31:50 UTC (180 KB) Access Paper: HTML (experimental) view license Current browse context: cs.CR < prev   |   next > new | recent | 2026-05 Change to browse by: cs References & Citations NASA ADS Google Scholar Semantic Scholar Export BibTeX Citation Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data, Media Demos Related Papers About arXivLabs Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)