Cisco AI Defense vs Zenity

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.

Zenity is a security and governance platform for AI agents: agents inside SaaS tools, agents built in-house on cloud AI platforms, and coding and personal agents on employee devices. It was co-founded by Ben Kliger (CEO) and Michael Bargury (CTO). It launched in April 2021 as a security platform for low-code/no-code development, added support for enterprise AI copilots in November 2023 and now focuses on agents. Research and development is in Tel Aviv, and go-to-market and operations are led from New York. Zenity says it has more than 230 employees. Its company page lists a $5 million seed round (November 2021), a $16.5 million Series A led by Intel Capital (September 2023), a strategic investment from Microsoft's M12 (July 2024), a $38 million Series B co-led by Third Point Ventures and DTCP (October 2024) and a $125 million Series C led by Norwest (August 2026). Zenity released a new version of its platform in August 2026, organized in three parts. Surface covers AI Observability (an inventory of agents, MCP servers, tools and data access, including agents built without security review), AISPM (configuration and permission checks before agents go live) and Exposure Management (which access paths are actually exploitable). Enforce covers Runtime Boundaries, which checks each agent action in real time and allows it, blocks it or shuts the agent down, including multi-step chains such as data exfiltration or privilege escalation; Agentic Identity, which gates actions on the identity an agent acts for in Okta or Microsoft Entra ID; and MCP Security, a gateway that allows, modifies or blocks tool calls and flags tool poisoning, rug pulls, shadow servers and over-scoped servers. Protect is AIDR, which detects direct and indirect prompt injection, data exfiltration, tool misuse and memory poisoning with LLM-based intent detection. Zenity names Microsoft 365 Copilot, Copilot Studio, Power Platform, ChatGPT Enterprise, Claude Enterprise, Salesforce Agentforce, ServiceNow, Amazon Bedrock and AgentCore, Google Vertex AI and Microsoft Foundry among the platforms it covers. For coding agents such as Cursor, Claude Code, Codex and GitHub Copilot, it collects activity through native agent hooks and OpenTelemetry and enforces policy through its MCP gateway. It sends agent findings to AWS Security Hub (in OCSF format) and to ServiceNow SecOps. **AI compliance coverage** Zenity maps its detections to the OWASP LLM Top 10 and MITRE ATLAS. We found no mapping on its site to the EU AI Act, the NIST AI RMF or ISO 42001. Its trust center says Zenity holds SOC 2 Type II and is ISO 27001 compliant and ISO 27701 compliant; reports are available on request. **Who it's for** Large enterprises running many agents across Microsoft, Salesforce, ServiceNow and OpenAI platforms, plus homegrown and coding agents, that want one policy layer over all of them. Zenity says most of its customers are Fortune 500 or Global 2000 companies; SoftBank Corp. is the only one named, in its Series C announcement. Gartner named Zenity a Cool Vendor in Agentic AI TRiSM (September 2025), and Zenity quotes an April 2026 Gartner report calling it the company to beat in AI agent governance.