Cisco AI Defense vs Robust Intelligence

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.

Robust Intelligence was an AI security company founded in 2019 by Yaron Singer, a Harvard computer science and applied mathematics professor who became its CEO, and Kojin Oshiba, his former student. It was based in San Francisco and also had operations in Israel. Sequoia Capital led its seed and Series A rounds ($14 million combined, announced in October 2020), and Tiger Global and Sequoia led a $30 million Series B in December 2021, bringing its funding to about $44 million. Cisco Investments was also an investor. Cisco announced its intent to acquire Robust Intelligence on August 26, 2024 and completed the deal on September 24, 2024. The price was not disclosed. Robust Intelligence is no longer a separate product: its technology is the core of Cisco AI Defense, which Cisco unveiled on January 15, 2025 and said would be available that March. Buyers should evaluate Cisco AI Defense. **What it sold** Robust Intelligence started with RIME (the Robust Intelligence Model Engine), built around an "AI Firewall" that wraps a model, checks its inputs and outputs, and stress-tests it. Its later platform had two parts. AI Validation automatically tested models for security and safety vulnerabilities (such as prompt injection and data poisoning) before and after deployment, scanned open-source models, data and files for supply chain vulnerabilities such as malicious pickle files, recommended guardrails and produced reports. AI Protection applied those guardrails in production. It ran as SaaS in Robust Intelligence's private AWS VPC or as a hybrid deployment with a self-hosted data plane, and it integrated with observability and SIEM tools such as Splunk, Datadog, CrowdStrike and AppDynamics. The company also co-developed the AI Risk Database and said it co-authored NIST's adversarial machine learning taxonomy and contributed to the OWASP Top 10 for LLM Applications. **Frameworks** Its product page says tests were mapped to the OWASP Top 10 for LLM Applications, MITRE ATLAS, NIST's adversarial machine learning taxonomy, the EU AI Act and the White House executive order on AI. It does not mention the NIST AI RMF or ISO 42001. Cisco AI Defense maps to the NIST AI RMF, MITRE ATLAS and the OWASP Top 10 for LLMs. **Status** The robustintelligence.com site is still online and describes AI Validation and AI Protection without mentioning Cisco. We found no current way to buy Robust Intelligence separately from Cisco.