What is the difference between prompt injection detection and prompt injection mitigation?

Detection identifies that a prompt injection attack is happening. Mitigation prevents that attack from succeeding. They answer two different questions: detection answers "is an attack occurring," and mitigation answers "can this attack cause harm."

Detection capabilities typically identify suspicious prompts, flag policy violations, alert security teams, and log attempts for investigation. Mitigation capabilities block malicious prompts before execution, prevent unsafe tool calls, restrict resource access, enforce policy, and stop sensitive data from being disclosed.

Enterprise AI security needs both, and they are not interchangeable. Detection without mitigation is an expensive audit log: you learn what happened after the damage is done. Mitigation without detection blocks harm but leaves you blind to attack patterns and trends, which makes it hard to tune controls or prove what was stopped. In agentic systems the stakes are higher than in a chatbot, because a successful injection does not just produce bad text. It can drive an unsafe tool call, escalate permissions, or chain multiple benign-looking steps into an exfiltration.

Akto combines runtime detection with policy-based enforcement so both questions are covered in one workflow. Security teams gain visibility into attempted prompt injection while actively preventing the harmful actions those attempts try to trigger across AI agents and MCP-connected tools.