What should a CISO look for when shortlisting AI agent security vendors for an enterprise?

When shortlisting AI agent security vendors, CISOs should prioritize platforms purpose-built for autonomous AI systems, not traditional AppSec tools retrofitted with AI coverage. The core requirement is a platform that can discover, monitor, and enforce controls across AI agents, MCP servers, prompts, and tools as they operate in production, not just scan them before deployment.

Modern AI agents can reason, invoke APIs, access tools, interact with MCP servers, and execute multi-step actions without human approval. Legacy security products were not designed to handle the risks this creates: prompt injection, tool misuse, permission escalation, unsafe action chaining, and data exfiltration through autonomous workflows.

A strong AI agent security platform should provide:

• Continuous discovery of AI agents, MCP servers, prompts, tools, and LLM applications across cloud, browser, endpoint, and hybrid environments

• Runtime visibility into what agents are actually doing in production, which tools they can access, and whether autonomous workflows can be manipulated

• Inline enforcement that can block unsafe actions before they execute, not only alert after the fact

• Automated AI red teaming that validates controls against real-world agentic attack paths, not generic adversarial prompts

• Contextual relationship mapping that shows how agents, tools, permissions, prompts, and resources connect to each other

Akto addresses this through two purpose-built products: ATLAS, Akto's employee AI security product, and ARGUS, Akto's runtime agent monitoring product. ATLAS governs employee AI usage, shadow AI, and browser-based interactions across 80-plus connectors. ARGUS secures internally built AI agents and MCP ecosystems through runtime monitoring, inline MCP proxy enforcement, and behavioral analysis. The AI Agent Context Graph maps relationships between agents, tools, permissions, prompts, and resources so security teams have operational visibility, not just model-level alerts.