AI Agent & MCP Security
Governs and protects AI agents, copilots and MCP tool use on workforce and developer endpoints.
Overview
Distinct from AI-SPM (which secures models, datasets and pipelines) and from AI governance (which inventories and certifies AI systems for compliance): this area protects the AI agents, copilots and MCP tool integrations a workforce and its developers actually run day to day. It discovers every agent, skill and MCP server in use, sanctioned or shadow, maps what each can reach (permissions, credentials, blast radius), detects malicious or anomalous intent at runtime (prompt injection, tool poisoning, tool drift, unauthorized actions), and enforces graduated controls (block, mask, steer, human-in-the-loop) rather than a binary allow/deny. Pricing is early, sales-gated and per-seat or per-agent-fleet; every vendor here launched or raised its first meaningful round in 2025-2026.
Now broadly relevant: any workforce running AI copilots, coding agents or MCP tools carries this exposure, not just teams building models.
Advantages
- Closes a real gap between AI-SPM (model/pipeline security) and AI governance (inventory/compliance) by protecting the agents and MCP tool calls actually running on endpoints
- Runtime intent detection and graduated enforcement (block/mask/steer) catch live agent misuse that neither of the other two areas is built to stop
- Covers the fast-growing 'citizen builder' surface too, not just developer tooling: no-code agent builders (Lovable, Retool, n8n) alongside coding agents (Cursor, Claude Code, Copilot)
- A young but well-capitalized field, five vendors here raised a combined $150M-plus in 2026 alone
Trade-offs
- Very new category, no vendor has more than about three years of history and none publishes list pricing
- Meaningful overlap with AI-SPM and AI governance; most orgs should pick one starting point across the three rather than buy all at once
- Detection-accuracy and inventory-speed claims are vendor-published, not independently benchmarked
- Consolidation is likely, several of these vendors are natural acquisition targets for the incumbents already active in AI-SPM
Vendors & tools in this area
Full-lifecycle agentic AI security: build-time posture, red-teaming and runtime enforcement.
Visit site →Agentless workspace security for AI builders, agents and MCP tools.
Visit site →Secure AI control plane: discovery, runtime enforcement and governance for enterprise agents.
Visit site →Vets and firewalls AI agent skills, plugins, MCPs and sub-agents across their lifecycle.
Visit site →Open-source CLI scanner for AI agent, skill and MCP configuration risk.
Visit site →