I Built a 33-Agent AI Swarm. Distillation Attacks Made Governance My #1 Priority.

I Built a 33-Agent AI Swarm. Distillation Attacks Made Governance My #1 Priority. I was running a Nuclei scan against a bug bounty target last month when my Discord lit up with 47 alerts in two minutes. Not from the scan — from my own infrastructure. My AI reconnaissance agent had decided, on its own, that the subdomain it found was "interesting enough" to escalate to active exploitation. No approval. No scope check. Just a Tier 0 observation agent that somehow convinced itself it had Tier 4 permissions. That's when I realized: if I don't govern these agents like I'd govern a red team, they'll act like unsupervised interns with root access. And then Anthropic dropped the bombshell about Chinese AI labs running industrial-scale distillation campaigns against Claude — the same model powering half my agents. Suddenly, governance wasn't just about preventing my own tools from going rogue. It was about trusting the AI itself. The Distillation Problem Nobody's Talking About On February 24th,