Cisco is introducing a variety of enhancements to its security portfolio to help enterprises adopt agentic AI with confidence—combining agent protection, interaction governance, and resilient connectivity for AI-driven workflows.
"In the age of AI, safety and security are pre-requisites for adoption, and AI agents bring a whole new set of challenges," said Jeetu Patel, Cisco's president and chief product officer. "As agents take on critical enterprise roles, we're developing protections that work both ways: preventing agents from being compromised and controlling what they can access and do on our behalf."
According to the company, agentic AI innovations have expanded the attack surface across AI supply chains and the tool ecosystem. Enterprises need protections that reduce the risk of agents being manipulated, or hijacked, including during tool interactions.
In the biggest expansion since its January 2025 launch, Cisco AI Defense delivers new features to better secure agents and the AI supply chain. These features include:
- AI BOM (Bill of Materials): Provides centralized visibility and governance for AI software assets, including model context protocol (MCP) servers and third-party dependencies, to secure the AI supply chain
- MCP Catalog: Discovers, inventories, and helps manage risk across MCP servers and registries spanning public and private platforms, strengthening AI governance
- Advanced algorithmic red teaming: Expands the scope of AI security assessments with adaptive single and multi-turn testing for models and agents in multiple languages
- Real-time agentic guardrails to keep agents and applications safe: Continuously monitor and inspect agentic interactions to detect manipulation or unsafe behavior—such as poisoned tools or prompts designed to trigger unauthorized tool use—helping teams enforce policy and reduce compromise risk
Together, these updates help teams inventory and govern AI assets, understand provenance, and surface vulnerabilities earlier in the AI development lifecycle, the company said.
The latest updates add mapping to Cisco’s new Integrated AI Security and Safety Framework to help teams better understand adversary objectives and measure risk exposure.
In addition, AI Defense’s runtime protections now feature a developer-ready integration with NVIDIA NeMo Guardrails’ open source framework, offering organizations a modular, interoperable architecture to protect AI systems in real time in production. AI Defense is a key component of the Cisco Secure AI Factory with NVIDIA, a validated reference architecture to securely power AI workloads in customer environments.
Additionally, Cisco SASE is unveiling new capabilities designed to both govern agent interactions and keep AI traffic reliable:
- AI traffic optimization for predictable performance during surges
- MCP visibility, logging, and policy control
- Intent-aware inspection of interactions and tool requests
- Unified policy enforcement across SD-WAN and SSE
Cisco is also announcing IOS XE 26, the latest version of the operating system that powers millions of networks globally. The new release powers its recently announced Cisco 8000 Series Secure Routers and Cisco C9000 Series Smart Switches, as well as two new variants of the 8100 Series Secure Routers for small and mid-size businesses, also available today. ,
Together, these advancements help organizations maintain predictable performance for AI-driven traffic across distributed environments and protect encrypted communications as they prepare for PQC, the company said.
For more information about this news, visit www.cisco.com.