What questions should a CISO ask an AI security vendor during a technical evaluation to separate genuine capability from marketing claims

During a technical evaluation of AI security vendors, CISOs should focus on how the platform secures AI agents in production, not on benchmark scores or demo environments. The gap between marketing claims and actual capability is widest in areas of runtime enforcement, continuous testing, and MCP security, where many vendors rely on static scanning rather than genuine behavioral monitoring.

These questions separate genuine capability from positioning:

Discovery and inventory

• Can the platform continuously discover AI agents, MCP servers, prompts, and tool connections automatically, or does it rely on manual registration?

• How does it detect shadow AI and unmanaged agent deployments?

Runtime monitoring

• Does the platform monitor agent behavior in production or only perform pre-deployment static scans?

• Can it detect prompt injection, tool misuse, and unsafe action chaining as they occur?

Enforcement

• Can the platform enforce policies inline before unsafe actions execute, or does it only alert after the fact?

• How does it reduce false positives without generating alert fatigue?

Testing

• Does the platform support continuous AI red teaming or only point-in-time assessments?

• Can tests be customized for your specific agents, workflows, and tools?

Integration and coverage

• Can it secure both employee AI usage and internally built agents from a single platform?

• How does it integrate with CI/CD pipelines, SIEM systems, and existing AppSec workflows?

• Can it inspect and enforce controls on MCP traffic?

Akto addresses each of these requirements across two products. ATLAS, Akto's employee AI security product, governs employee AI usage, shadow AI, and browser-based interactions. ARGUS, Akto's runtime agent monitoring product, secures internally built agents through runtime monitoring and inline MCP enforcement. Agent Probe provides continuous adversarial testing with more than 4,000 test cases.