The way AI agents connect to the internet has, until now, been an afterthought - borrowing the user's VPN settings or operating entirely without encryption. Norton VPN is attempting to change that with VPN for Agents, a new product it describes as the first AI-native VPN architecture built explicitly for autonomous agents, requiring no app installation and supporting simultaneous, isolated connections across multiple countries at once. The product is currently available to a limited number of users through the Gen Agent Trust Hub.
Why Existing VPNs Fall Short for Autonomous Agents
Traditional VPNs were designed for a single user browsing from a single device. The underlying architecture assumes one human, one connection, one location. AI agents - software systems that execute tasks autonomously on a user's behalf, from booking travel to scraping data to managing files - don't fit that model at all.
When an AI agent needs to access a geographically restricted service or operate securely across platforms, it currently faces one of two unsatisfactory options: either skip the VPN entirely, exposing its traffic, or inherit the host user's VPN settings wholesale, which ties the agent to a single fixed location and can disrupt the user's own connection. Neither option reflects how agents actually work - running multiple parallel tasks, across different services, potentially requiring different regional identities simultaneously.
The result has been a structural mismatch between the pace and complexity of agentic AI activity and the inflexible, human-centric architecture of conventional VPN clients.
How VPN for Agents Restructures the Connection Model
Norton's solution abandons the idea of a persistent, system-wide VPN client altogether. Instead, VPN for Agents creates temporary, isolated VPN tunnels - each one specific to a single agent task and a single geographic location - using Docker containers. When the task is complete, the container is destroyed and the VPN instance disappears with it. Nothing persists, nothing bleeds across tasks.
This architecture enables what Norton calls multi-tunnel, multi-location support: an agent can simultaneously handle requests routed through different countries, each running inside its own independent Docker-based VPN instance. There is no interference between tasks, and no interference with the user's own internet activity. The connection is encrypted, temporary, and purpose-built.
Crucially, the system requires no client application and no command-line installation. For developers building or deploying AI agents, that removes a meaningful friction point - integration happens at the architectural level rather than requiring configuration on each host machine.
Himmat Bains, product lead at Norton VPN, described the development as a fundamental rethink rather than an extension of existing technology: "These weren't incremental improvements, they required us to rethink what a VPN can be." The product was built collaboratively by Gen Threat Labs and Gen AI Foundry, the AI-focused arm of Gen Digital, Norton's parent company.
A Market Beginning to Take Shape
Norton is not the only provider moving into this space. ExpressVPN has developed a solution that allows AI agents to adjust the ExpressVPN application's settings directly - functional, but architecturally it grafts agent access onto a tool designed for humans, which carries its own limitations. Windscribe has also developed agent-compatible VPN tooling, though its current focus is narrower, targeting OpenClaw systems running in dedicated, isolated machine environments.
The distinction Norton is drawing is one of design philosophy. Rather than adapting an existing human-facing product, VPN for Agents was built from scratch around the communication patterns of autonomous software - fast, parallel, multi-platform, and stateless. Whether that architectural difference translates into a clear practical advantage will depend on the specific deployment context, but it represents a more coherent long-term approach as agent workloads grow more complex.
The broader context matters here. The number of autonomous AI agents operating across the internet is expanding rapidly, and the infrastructure supporting them - security, identity, access control - is still catching up. A VPN designed for a world of eight billion human users does not automatically scale to a world where software agents may eventually outnumber people online by orders of magnitude. The question of how those agents authenticate, where they appear to operate from, and how their traffic is protected is not a niche engineering concern. It is becoming a foundational question of digital security architecture.
What Comes Next
VPN for Agents is currently in limited availability through the Gen Agent Trust Hub. Bains confirmed that Norton's broader VPN roadmap continues in parallel, with additional updates expected in the near term. For now, the product sits at an intersection that is only beginning to attract serious attention: the point where agentic AI infrastructure meets privacy and network security.
For developers and enterprises already deploying autonomous agents at scale, a dedicated, installation-free, multi-tunnel VPN layer is a practically useful tool. For the wider industry, it signals that the era of retrofitting human-centric security tools onto non-human software is ending - and that purpose-built infrastructure for the agentic layer of the internet is arriving.