Akto Named a Pioneer in Gartner®’s Emerging Market Quadrant for AI Application Security

Akto has been named a Pioneer in Gartner’s Emerging Market Quadrant for AI Application Security - Startup Vendors.

Gartner describes Pioneer vendors as taking an advanced architectural approach to securing the full lifecycle of agentic AI applications, spanning areas such as AIsecurity posture, automated AI redteaming, runtime AI monitoring and control, policy enforcement, behavioral analysis, and agent and tool activity.

That direction closely reflects how Akto has been building its AI security platform.

Today, Akto helps Fortune 1000 enterprises secure both the AI they build and the AI their employees use, from discovering AI applications, agents, MCP servers, skills, and plugins, to continuously testing them, enforcing runtime guardrails, tracing agent execution, and governing AI activity from one place.

The recognition also comes at a time when the AI security boundary is expanding rapidly. AI systems are no longer just prompts and responses. Agents now interact with tools, identities, permissions, APIs, MCP servers, and enterprise data, which means security has to follow the complete execution path.

What do the Four Quadrants say about the AI security market?

Gartner divides AI security startup vendors into four groups, each reflecting a different mix of product depth, technical differentiation, and ability to execute.

Quadrant #1 is Market Shapers that **combine broad agentic security coverage with strong scale.

Quadrant #2 is Pioneers, which includes Akto as one of the AI Security startups. Pioneers are described as architecturally advanced vendors building across the full agentic AI application lifecycle. Gartner highlights posture management, automated testing, runtime defense, custom policy controls, runtime visibility, behavioral analysis, and supervision of agent actions and tool interactions. Pioneers are vendors with strong differentiation in their AI Security capabilities

Quadrants #3 is Specialists are vendors with capabilities built for niche demand, very early in the product lifecycle.

Quadrant #4 is Pace Setters are vendors who tend to focus on narrower areas and have technical regional teams.

The broader signal is clear: AI application security is moving toward integrated platforms that combine AI discovery, AI redteaming, runtime AI control, and continuous AI governance.

What Defines Akto as a Pioneer

For Akto, the Pioneer placement aligns closely with how we have built the platform.

AI security is not a single control point. It is a continuous loop: discover what is running, test it, enforce policy at runtime, understand what happened, and feed that context back into governance.

Akto brings shadow AI discovery, observability, runtime protection, red teaming, posture, agent identity, and governance into one platform:

• Shadow AI discovery: Discover AI usage across the web, endpoints, IDEs, and CLIs, including agents, LLMs, MCP servers, skills, and plugins.

• AI Observability: Capture full execution traces across prompts, model responses, MCP calls, tool calls, parameters, results, retrievals, and external requests.

• AI Runtime protection: Enforce guardrails across prompts, responses, tool calls, and agent actions, including prompt injection, DLP, malicious URLs, harmful content, schema validation, permission enforcement, token limits, and tool misuse.

• AI Red teaming: Continuously test AI applications, agents, and MCP infrastructure with 4,000+ security probes covering prompt injection, tool abuse, malicious tools, excessive agency, authorization failures, memory risks, and other agentic attack paths.

• AI Security Posture: Continuously assess AI security posture across applications, agents, MCP servers, skills, and plugins, surfacing risky configurations, exposed assets, excessive permissions, and control gaps.

• AI Agent identity: Understand which agents are operating, what they can access, and which identities, tools, models, and permissions they are using.

• AI Governance: Apply RBAC and contextual access policies across agents, models, MCP servers, skills, environments, and actions. For example, allow access to a specific MCP server with one approved model while blocking the same server with another.

Akto Atlas covers the employee AI layer, helping security teams discover and govern AI apps, agents, MCP servers, skills, and plugins used across the workforce, while applying runtime controls to those interactions.

Akto Argus covers internally built AI applications and agents, with security testing, runtime guardrails, MCP traffic controls, and execution visibility across agent activity.

That gives enterprises one security layer across both the AI they build and the AI their employees use.

And while the Gartner recognition is important, the stronger proof point for us is deployment: Akto is already serving Fortune 1000 companies, securing real AI environments in production.

Building for a Rapidly Evolving AI Security Landscape

Gartner published separate Emerging Market Quadrants for Startup Vendors and Established Vendors, with each group evaluated relative to the vendors in its own quadrant.

In the startup report, Gartner notes that smaller vendors can adapt quickly, tailor products more closely to customer requirements, and involve customers more directly in how the product develops.

That speed is especially relevant in AI security. New models, agents, MCP servers, skills, plugins, and development frameworks keep introducing new security requirements.

At Akto, staying focused on AI security lets us work directly with customers, investigate new attack patterns, and ship new controls as the AI stack changes.

Enterprises also need reliability, integrations, and proven deployments. Akto is already serving Fortune 1000 companies while continuing to expand its AI security platform.

Akto’s Growing Gartner Recognition

The Pioneer designation adds to Akto’s Gartner recognition across multiple areas of AI security.

In 2026, Akto was also named:

• A Sample Vendor for AI Security Testing in the Gartner Hype Cycle for AI Services, 2026

• A Sample Vendor for AI Runtime Defense in the *Gartner Hype Cycle for AI Governance, 2026*

• A Sample Vendor for AI Runtime Defense in the Gartner Hype Cycle for Data Security Technologies, 2026

Akto was also named a Representative Vendor in Gartner’s 2025 guide on securing AI agents.

Together, these recognitions cover AI security testing, runtime defense, governance, data security, and agent security. That maps closely to how enterprises are approaching AI security today: they need visibility into what is being used, testing before deployment, controls during execution, and governance across the full AI environment.

Disclaimer

Source: Gartner, Emerging Market Quadrant for AI Application Security – Startup Vendors, September 2026.

Gartner is a trademark of Gartner, Inc., and/or its affiliates.

Gartner does not endorse any company, vendor, product or service depicted in its publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s business and technology insights organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this publication, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.