Cisco Unveils Innovative AI Security Measures at RSA 2026
Cisco Systems unveiled a comprehensive suite of AI security innovations at the RSA Conference 2026 in San Francisco on March 23. These were designed specifically to secure the emerging “agentic workforce”, where AI agents act autonomously across enterprise systems.
The networking giant introduced several groundbreaking security solutions. These include Zero Trust Access extended to AI agents, DefenseClaw—an open-source secure agent framework—and AI Defense: Explorer Edition for self-service security testing. The introduction of these tools addresses a critical gap in the market. While 85% of major enterprises are experimenting with AI agents, only 5% have moved them into production environments due to security concerns.
“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 company’s new Zero Trust capabilities enable organizations to establish trusted identities for AI agents, map them to accountable human owners, and enforce strict access controls with time-bound permissions.
DefenseClaw integrates essential security tools including Skills Scanner, MCP Scanner, and AI BoM. It automatically scans and sandboxes every skill and verifies MCP servers. The framework hooks directly into NVIDIA’s OpenShell to provide robust automated security at runtime.
Additionally, Cisco enhanced its Splunk platform with specialized AI agents for security operations centers. These include Detection Studio and Malware Threat Reversing Agent, which are now generally available, with additional agents launching through June 2026.
Source: Cisco Reimagines Security for the Agentic Workforce