Cisco has announced its intention to acquire Astrix Security Ltd., a leading innovator in Non-Human Identity (NHI) security, to strengthen its capabilities in securing the rapidly growing ecosystem of AI agents.
The move comes as organisations worldwide accelerate the adoption of agentic AI — autonomous AI systems capable of making decisions and taking actions at machine speed. While these AI agents promise unprecedented productivity, they also introduce a new and rapidly expanding attack surface that traditional security models are struggling to address.
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“AI agents represent an entirely new class of coworker,” said Peter Bailey of Cisco. “Capable of incredible productivity, but also capable of unintended harm or malicious behaviour if left unsecured.”
According to Cisco’s AI Readiness Index, only 24% of organisations can currently control agent actions with proper guardrails and live monitoring, while just 31% feel fully equipped to secure their agentic AI systems. This capability gap is widening as threat actors leverage advanced AI models to exploit non-human identities such as API keys, service accounts, and OAuth tokens.
Astrix Security, founded five years ago, has established itself as a pioneer in discovering, governing, and securing non-human identities and AI agents. The company offers solutions for agent discovery and governance, access and lifecycle management, threat detection and response, and centralized secrets management.
The acquisition will enhance Cisco’s Zero Trust architecture by integrating Astrix’s capabilities into Cisco Identity Intelligence, Cisco Secure Access, and Duo Identity and Access Management. This will enable organisations to discover, authenticate, authorise, and monitor AI agents across their environments with greater visibility and control.
Cisco plans to combine Astrix’s specialised NHI security expertise with its own broad visibility across network, identity, application, and infrastructure layers, further strengthened by Splunk’s analytics and observability capabilities.
The deal reflects Cisco’s broader commitment to building comprehensive AI security solutions, including AI Defense, model protection tools, and secure AI development frameworks. By bringing Astrix’s world-class team and technology into the Cisco Security portfolio, the company aims to help enterprises confidently adopt agentic AI while maintaining robust security, compliance, and governance standards.
