Cisco has announced its intention to acquire Astrix Security, a cybersecurity startup focused on protecting AI agents and non-human identities (NHIs). The deal, whose financial terms have not been disclosed, is expected to close later this year and will see Astrix's technology integrated across several Cisco security portfolios, including Identity Intelligence, Secure Access, and Duo Identity and Access Management.
Astrix Security was founded five years ago with the mission of securing the credentials that power modern automated systems—API keys, service accounts, and OAuth tokens. As organizations increasingly deploy AI agents that use these credentials to perform tasks at scale, the attack surface has grown dramatically. According to Peter Bailey, senior vice president and general manager of Cisco's security business, the addition of Astrix brings deep capabilities to discover and secure every AI agent and NHI, including excessive privileges and real-time threat detection, enabling organizations to adopt AI securely and at scale.
The growing challenge of AI agent security
The proliferation of AI agents—autonomous software programs that can plan, execute, and adapt tasks—has created a new category of digital identities that traditional security tools often overlook. These agents connect to enterprise systems via APIs, retrieve data, execute workflows, and trigger actions—all without direct human oversight. In many cases, they inherit credentials originally intended for human users or long-lived service accounts, making them prime targets for attackers.
Cisco's own AI Readiness Index highlighted the severity of the gap: only 24% of organizations can control agent actions with proper guardrails and live monitoring, and just 31% feel fully capable of securing their agent AI systems. Astrix directly addresses these challenges by providing continuous discovery of every agent and NHI in an environment, mapping their relationships to data and systems, and applying policy to ensure least-privilege access.
The company's platform maintains a real-time inventory of all AI agents, Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers, and NHIs, enriched with context to understand risk and business usage. This visibility is critical because agents and other NHIs now outnumber human identities by a ratio of 100:1 in many organizations, yet they remain largely under the radar of existing identity and access management (IAM) solutions.
Astrix capabilities and Cisco integration plans
Astrix offers three main pillars of functionality. First, discovery and governance for AI agents: it provides a map of the organization's agentic activity, enforces policies to resolve hygiene issues, reduces the attack surface, and prevents compliance violations. Second, agentic access and lifecycle management: it manages AI agents and their NHIs from provisioning through decommissioning, ensuring that credentials are rotated, revoked, or updated as agents change roles. Third, agentic threat detection and response: it detects and responds to threats such as compromised credentials, out-of-scope agent actions, and anomalous behavior indicative of a breach.
Cisco plans to bring these capabilities into its Identity Intelligence platform, which already provides a unified identity fabric across users, devices, and workloads. By integrating Astrix, Cisco will extend that fabric to include agentic and non-human identities, offering a single pane of glass for all identity types. Additionally, the technology will be incorporated into Cisco's zero-trust access portfolio, including Secure Access (a cloud-delivered security service edge solution) and Duo (a multi-factor authentication and access management product). Customers will be able to discover, authenticate, and authorize agentic identities directly through these tools, and detect and respond to threats in real time. The intelligence from Astrix will also feed into Splunk (or any SIEM), giving security teams a unified view of agent activity with the context needed to investigate and respond at machine speed.
Background and previous acquisitions
Astrix Security is the second AI-management-related acquisition Cisco has made in recent weeks. In April 2026, Cisco announced plans to acquire Galileo Technologies, an AI observability firm. Galileo's platform provides real-time observability and guardrails for the development of multi-agent systems. That technology is expected to strengthen Cisco's Splunk observability portfolio by bringing improved AI agent monitoring capabilities, real-time visibility, and protection to the agent development lifecycle.
Together, the two acquisitions signal Cisco's strategic commitment to securing the entire lifecycle of AI agents—from development and testing through deployment and ongoing operations. While Galileo addresses observability and safety during the build phase, Astrix focuses on runtime governance and protection after agents are put into production. This end-to-end approach is increasingly important as enterprises move from experimenting with AI assistants to deploying autonomous agents that can take independent actions across critical business processes.
The market for non-human identity security is also growing rapidly, driven by the expansion of machine-to-machine communication, cloud-native architectures, and the adoption of agentic AI. According to industry analysts, the NHI security market could exceed $2 billion by 2030, as organizations grapple with the complexity of managing millions of programmatic identities. Startups such as Conductor, Semper, and Oort have also entered the space, but Astrix has distinguished itself with a focus specifically on AI agents and their unique risk profile.
Astrix was co-founded by Alon Jackson and Idan Gour, who previously held security roles at major technology companies. In a blog post announcing the deal, they wrote: "Astrix became the platform security teams turn to when they need to discover, govern, and protect every agentic and non-human identity across their environment, from provisioning to decommissioning, from policy enforcement to real-time threat detection. Joining Cisco means Astrix now has the scale, the reach, and the platform to bring agentic and NHI security to organizations worldwide."
The acquisition is subject to customary closing conditions and regulatory approvals. Once completed, it will be one of several strategic moves by Cisco to bolster its security portfolio, which already includes Duo, Umbrella, SecureX, and the recently acquired Splunk. As the cybersecurity landscape evolves with the rapid adoption of AI, Cisco is positioning itself to offer comprehensive protection for all identity types—human, machine, and agent alike.
Source: Network World News