What is shadow AI and how can security teams detect unauthorized agents?

Shadow AI is any AI agent, LLM app, MCP tool, or employee-built automation running inside your environment without security team visibility or approval.

It happens more than most teams realize. Employees connect agents to internal systems, spin up automations through browser extensions, or plug third-party AI services into business apps - often with zero ill intent, just trying to move faster. The security review process never gets involved.

The risks that creates:

• Unauthorized access to sensitive data

• Sensitive information leaking to third-party AI services

• Unapproved tools with excessive permissions

• Compliance violations no one knows about

• Unmonitored MCP connections running in the background

Detecting it requires continuous discovery across laptops, cloud environments, SaaS applications, repositories, and infrastructure - not a one-time audit.

Akto's Agentic AI Discovery automatically identifies AI agents, MCP servers, tools, resources, and AI-enabled applications across enterprise environments. It builds and continuously updates an inventory of what's authorized and what isn't, so security teams can assess risk and enforce policies before shadow AI becomes an incident.