By AI agents are already running on employee machines without IT knowledge, without policy enforcement, and without any audit trail. The tooling enterprises use to govern servers, pipelines, and cloud workloads does not extend to the local agent runtime. That blind spot is growing every day a developer installs a coding agent and lets it run autonomously in the background.
In this interview on TFiR, Miska Kaipiainen, Head of Product, Lens at Mirantis, walks through the agent governance gap at the local machine level, why it represents an immediate enterprise risk, and how Lens is building a platform to address it using its existing base of over one million Kubernetes developers.
Guest: Miska Kaipiainen, Head of Product, Lens at Mirantis
Show: TFiR
Here is what every platform engineer and enterprise security team needs to know.
Technical Deep Dive
Q: What are the biggest security risks enterprises face from unmanaged or poorly governed AI agents right now?
Miska Kaipiainen, Head of Product, Lens at Mirantis, identifies the core risk as AI agents already running on employee laptops, often without any enterprise awareness or governance policy in place. Tools like Claude Code can be running autonomously in the background on a developer machine right now, and most enterprises have no visibility into what those agents are accessing or executing. Kaipiainen frames this not as a future problem but as an immediate threat that requires an urgent governance answer.
“It’s just a matter of time when something very, very bad will happen. I hope that just raising the awareness that even if it’s some innocent looking agent running on your laptop is a massive security threat for many enterprises.” — Miska Kaipiainen, Head of Product, Lens, Mirantis
Q: How can enterprises govern AI agents running on employee laptops rather than on company-controlled infrastructure?
Kaipiainen acknowledges this is an open and unsolved problem at the industry level. The question of how to extend enterprise governance policy to agents running on personal or employee-managed machines does not yet have a widely adopted answer. He treats it as a critical gap that the industry needs to address before a serious incident forces a reactive response.
“How can you actually govern even those agents that run on your employees’ laptops? That is a question that I think we need to have an answer to very soon. Otherwise it’s going to be wild times ahead.” — Miska Kaipiainen, Head of Product, Lens, Mirantis
Q: How does Lens’s existing base of over one million Kubernetes developers shape its approach to AI agent governance?
Kaipiainen explains that the large existing user base gives Lens the ability to deliver a governance solution directly to developers who are already running agents locally, without requiring enterprise procurement or a top-down IT rollout. The strategy is to first serve individual developers with safe local agent technology, then use that adoption to demonstrate value to the enterprises employing those developers. Distribution through an established practitioner community is treated as a structural advantage for rolling out the governance layer at scale.
“We hope that since there are quite many users we have, we are able to help those users almost immediately by providing them with the safe technology to run agents on their local machines just like that.” — Miska Kaipiainen, Head of Product, Lens, Mirantis
Q: How is Lens evolving from a Kubernetes IDE into an AI agent platform?
Kaipiainen describes Lens agents as an extension of the existing Lens platform, moving from a Kubernetes development environment into a runtime and governance layer for AI agents operating on local machines. The framing positions Lens not as a point tool for agent execution but as a platform that enterprises and their developers can use to make AI agent usage fundamentally safer. The goal is to grow from individual developer adoption into enterprise-wide agent governance.
“We try to use our bigger reach to spread the solution that we feel is fundamentally making use of AI and AI agents more safe for everybody.” — Miska Kaipiainen, Head of Product, Lens, Mirantis
Resources & Documentation
- Mirantis, company behind Lens and the Lens agent platform for Kubernetes and local AI agent governance
- Lens, Kubernetes IDE and developer platform with over one million users, evolving into an AI agent runtime and governance environment
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👇 Click to Read Full Raw Transcript
Swapnil Bhartiya: Now let’s talk about risk. What are the biggest dangers enterprises are facing right now from agents that are unmanaged or poorly governed?
Miska Kaipiainen: Oh gosh. And, and by the way, and by the way, this is kind of, this is a serious threat because I think all of us, you know, probably everybody who is listening to this, you know, show, for example, right now, they are probably having somewhere on their machine already maybe Claude code doing some work in the background. So it’s just a matter of time when something very, very bad will happen. I hope that just rising the awareness that even if it’s some innocent looking agent running on your laptop is a massive security threat for many enterprises. How can you actually govern even those agents that run on your employees laptops? That is a question that I think we need to have an answer very soon. Otherwise it’s going to be wild times ahead.
Swapnil Bhartiya: Now, I’ve been covering Lens since day one when it was acquired by Mirantis. It started as a Kubernetes IDE with over a million developers. How does that foundation tells you how to approach building a governance layer? And why does that existing footprint user base matter for where agents actually live and operate? How is that experience helping you build Lens agents?
Miska Kaipiainen: Well, I think first of all we hope that since there are quite many users we have, so we are able to help those users kind of almost like immediately by providing them with the safe technology to run agents on their local machines just like that. So that’s of course what we are hoping to do right away. And hopefully later on the companies who are basically employing these people will also find the value with the Lens agents as a platform for the same reasons. So I think we try to of course use our bigger reach to spread the solution that we feel is fundamentally kind of making use of AI and AI agents more safe for everybody basically. So we hope that yeah, many people will find us and we’ll start using our technologies.
