By Kristian McCann
Publication Date: 2026-03-23 12:30:00
At RSA Conference 2026 in San Francisco, Cisco announced a sweeping set of security capabilities designed to meet the rapid rise of AI agents in enterprise operations.
“AI agents aren’t just making existing work faster; they’re a new workforce of co-workers that dramatically expand what organizations can accomplish,”
said Jeetu Patel, President and Chief Product Officer at Cisco.
The headline announcements include the extension of Zero Trust Access to AI agents through Cisco Identity Intelligence, a new self-service security testing tool called AI Defense: Explorer Edition, an open-source agent security framework named DefenseClaw, and a major expansion of AI-powered threat response capabilities inside Splunk.
Together, these represent one of the most comprehensive attempts yet by a major vendor to build a security foundation purpose-built for agentic AI.
Breaking Down the Announcements
The first and most foundational announcement is the…