About the AI Application and Runtime Security category
What belongs in this category
The AI Application and Runtime Security category covers securing AI applications that an organization builds or deploys, such as chatbots, copilots and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) apps, which answer from a company's own documents. Typical entries sit between users, models and data and inspect prompts, retrieved content, tool outputs and responses, blocking prompt injection and jailbreak attempts, stopping sensitive data from leaking in answers, and enforcing rules on what the application may say or do.
Runtime protection is about the live application. Testing an AI application before release fits AI Red Teaming, finding AI assets and misconfigurations fits AI Security Posture Management (AI-SPM), and protecting agents that take actions fits Agentic AI Security. A runtime product can also enter Security for AI, the broad AI security category.
Related categories to enter
Each category is judged separately, so you can enter a product in every category that matches what it does, with a separate nomination for each. Tailor each nomination to that category's focus. Entering several related categories gives the product more than one chance to be recognized.
How entries are judged
An independent jury of security practitioners, analysts and CISOs scores each nomination on leadership, innovation and impact. Each nomination competes in its category against organizations of similar size and region, so a mid-sized firm is not ranked against a global enterprise. Your entry package, any sponsorship and public votes do not affect the jury's scores.
Strong entries in this category show:
- Leadership — the AI applications the product protects in production: prompts inspected, applications and models covered, and customers running customer-facing AI with it.
- Innovation — a runtime problem solved in a new way, such as catching indirect prompt injection hidden in documents, keeping added delay low at high volume, or protection that works across different model providers.
- Impact — what customers gained: injection and jailbreak attempts detected, with detection and false-positive rates on a stated test set, sensitive data kept out of responses, AI applications released that were previously held back. Give figures from customers.
The jury awards Gold, Silver or Bronze, or a Finalist badge, and results are published on this site and announced to the 600,000+ member Cybersecurity Insiders community. Every approved nomination also enters the separate Community Choice award, decided by public votes.
How to enter
A vendor can enter its own product or service, and a PR agency can enter it on a client's behalf. The nomination form has a confidential field for detail that is shared with the judges and not published, such as customer names, deployment figures or roadmap. Deadlines, pricing and entry steps are on the How it Works page.
