Cisco AI Defense vs Knostic

Cisco AI Defense is Cisco's security product for enterprise AI applications, models and agents. Cisco unveiled it on January 15, 2025 and said it would be available that March. It is built on Robust Intelligence, the AI security startup Cisco announced it would acquire on August 26, 2024 and finished acquiring on September 24, 2024; Dark Reading called Robust Intelligence the core component of AI Defense. The product is sold by Cisco Systems, Inc., which was incorporated in 1984 and is based in San Jose; this profile lists Cisco's founding year and headquarters, as the directory does for other big-company products. Cisco's May 2026 data sheet splits the product into four parts. AI Cloud Visibility discovers AI models, applications, connected data sources, MCP servers and agents, including assets in Amazon Bedrock, Google Vertex and Azure AI Foundry. AI Supply Chain Risk Management scans model files, repositories and MCP servers and tools, and gives each asset a risk score. AI Model and Application Validation runs algorithmic red teaming with more than 200 attack techniques and threat subcategories. AI Runtime Protection applies safety, security and privacy guardrails, enforces MCP policies at runtime and protects agent behavior. Runtime checks can run at the network level through Cisco Multicloud Defense, through a gateway, or through an Inspection API. Hybrid deployments (AWS EKS, Azure AKS, GCP and on-premises AI PODs on OpenShift) keep sensitive data in the customer's environment. A separate AI Access module, for employee use of third-party AI apps, comes through Cisco Secure Access and needs its Advantage package. **Agent and MCP security** In February 2026 Cisco added an AI bill of materials, an MCP Catalog, multi-turn red teaming of models and agents, real-time agentic guardrails and an integration with NVIDIA NeMo Guardrails; the release gave no availability dates. In March 2026 it launched AI Defense: Explorer Edition, a self-service red-teaming tool Cisco offers at no upfront cost, and announced an Agent Runtime SDK for Amazon Bedrock AgentCore, Google Vertex Agent Builder, Azure AI Foundry and LangChain, plus DefenseClaw, an open-source agent security framework. **Frameworks** Cisco says AI Defense has mapped to NIST, OWASP and MITRE frameworks since launch. Its data sheet names the NIST AI RMF, MITRE ATLAS and the OWASP Top 10 for LLMs, and red-team reports also map to Cisco's own Integrated AI Security and Safety Framework. We found no documented support for the EU AI Act or ISO 42001. **Who it's for** Large enterprises that already use Cisco security products (Secure Access, Multicloud Defense, Splunk) and want AI discovery, red teaming and runtime guardrails from one vendor. Cisco doesn't publish prices.

Knostic is an AI security company founded in 2023 by Gadi Evron (CEO) and Sounil Yu (CTO). It is based in Herndon, Virginia. It started out selling need-to-know access controls for enterprise AI assistants such as Microsoft 365 Copilot and Glean, which keep answers from exposing data a user shouldn't see. Its website now calls it "the control plane for agentic AI on the endpoint", and it sells two products for AI coding assistants and agents. Kirin runs alongside Cursor, Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, Windsurf, Codex, JetBrains, Devin Desktop and Gemini CLI, and supports Claude Cowork through a plugin. It checks each tool call against policy before it runs and blocks it, downgrades it or sends it to a human. It also validates MCP connections, scans dependencies for hallucinated, vulnerable or malicious packages, and finds and redacts secrets before they reach the model. It audits agent instruction files such as CLAUDE.md and .cursorrules. Kirin installs as a lightweight user-space client that admins can roll out with MDM scripts, on macOS and Windows; Linux is in beta. Its Shadow AI Discovery reports unsanctioned AI use but doesn't block it. AgentMesh scans agent skills, MCP servers and VS Code extensions and labels each one dangerous, risky or clean. In June 2026 VirusTotal added AgentMesh analysis of VS Code extensions. Knostic also publishes an open-source scanner, OpenAnt. Knostic still has a page that pairs it with Microsoft Purview against Copilot oversharing, and its AWS Marketplace listing is still the Copilot Readiness product. Its homepage, product and pricing pages no longer describe that product. It raised a $3.3 million pre-seed round in April 2024 and an $11 million round led by Bright Pixel Capital in March 2025. In 2025 it also received a $5 million investment as an RSAC Innovation Sandbox finalist. In June 2025 Virginia Business put its total funding at $19 million and its headcount at about 30. In October 2025 Gartner named Knostic a Cool Vendor in AI Cybersecurity Governance, for its controls on AI oversharing. **AI compliance coverage** Knostic doesn't map its products to the EU AI Act, the NIST AI RMF or ISO 42001. Its trust center lists a SOC 2 Type 2 report and GDPR, its FAQ offers a compliance package with the SOC 2 report and pen test results, and its Enterprise plan includes compliance reporting. **Who it's for** Security teams at companies whose developers use AI coding agents, agent skills and MCP servers. It is not a governance, model inventory or model testing platform.