NOMINATION HIGHLIGHTS

Akto delivers the most operationally complete AI agent governance platform available, one that translates policy intent into enforced, validated, continuously tested controls across the full agentic attack surface.

Governance of agentic AI fails in three predictable ways: organizations do not know what AI they have deployed, the policies they define are not enforced at the execution layer, and controls are never validated against real adversarial conditions. Akto closes all three gaps in a single platform.

1. Visibility before governance. Akto automatically discovers every AI agent, MCP server, connected tool, resource, and data access path across cloud environments, employee endpoints, browsers, and internal infrastructure, including unmanaged and shadow AI. The AI Agent Context Graph maps how agents, tools, prompts, permissions, and resources interact in production, surfacing the relationships where governance failures actually occur: unsafe action chains, over-permissioned tools, MCP trust boundary violations, and cross-system data access paths. You cannot govern what you cannot see, and Akto’s discovery coverage across 50+ connectors ensures nothing is invisible.

2. Enforcement at the execution layer. Akto blocks PII, credentials, source code, and denied topics across every employee AI interaction, and governs shadow AI across browsers and endpoints. The MCP Proxy sits inline between clients and MCP servers, enforcing authentication, tool-level authorization, and behavioral guardrails before unsafe actions complete. Every guardrail is configurable per server, direction, and enforcement mode (block or log). Five layers:
a. Content and policy guardrails: prompt injection, context poisoning, intent violations
b. Sensitive information controls: PII filtering with automatic anonymization, secrets detection
c. Tool guardrails: tool misuse, malicious tool invocation, name-to-description mismatch
d. Code execution controls: unexpected or unsafe code execution triggered by agent behavior
e. Custom LLM-based policies: configurable to organizational risk thresholds
The built-in Playground validates every guardrail against real attack scenarios before deployment, so governance is demonstrated, not assumed.

3. Continuous validation, not periodic audits. Akto red teaming engine runs 4,000+ adversarial probes continuously, covering prompt injection, tool misuse, privilege escalation, and unsafe multi-step behaviors, integrated into CI/CD pipelines so governance controls are validated as part of every deployment cycle. The built-in Playground lets security teams test every guardrail configuration against known attack scenarios before going live.

Compliance built in: Executive dashboards provide a single governance view covering agentic asset inventory, guardrail performance, sensitive data events, and policy coverage mapped to FedRAMP, MITRE ATLAS, CIS Controls, and CMMC, without manual log triage.