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What’s shaping the AI agent security market in 2026

Published Date
Author Shay Saffer

Digital AI agents moving across illuminated data pathways with security icons like locks and fingerprints, representing AI agent security and identity protection.

For the past two years, AI agents have dominated boardroom conversations, product roadmaps, and investor decks. Companies made bold promises, tested early prototypes, and poured resources into innovation, with analysts projecting an economic impact of $2.6 trillion to $4.4 trillion. As 2026 begins, the experimentation phase ends and the production era starts as organizations roll out AI agents at scale across their enterprises.

Teams will strive to make their visions a reality this year, moving beyond demos and pilots into fully operational systems that operate at scale. We’ll see AI agents running across environments like engineering, IT operations, customer support, finance, and security workflows, where they’ll execute real business processes, handle sensitive data, and deliver measurable value at machine velocity.

But speed is only half of the equation. And as teams emerge from 2025’s testing phase for AI agents, they must place renewed focus on reliability, accountability, and control.

Pull quote reading “Security for AI agents won’t live in isolation. It will become part of a broader security platform, with identity, access, and privilege serving as foundational controls.”

That’s why 2026 is shaping up to be the year the AI agent security market solidifies.

How AI agents change enterprise security assumptions

While AI agents are beginning to come standard in applications, they don’t behave like software in the conventional sense. Rather, they are autonomous actors inside the organization. Non-deterministic systems by design, they reason, act, access other systems, call APIs, move data, trigger workflows, and make decisions.

For CISOs and technology leaders, these new levels of agency and autonomy create immediate and unavoidable challenges.

Enterprises can’t compromise on security, compliance, or data privacy for themselves or their customers. At the same time, development teams are moving fast, often faster than traditional governance and security models were designed to handle. AI agents only compound these challenges across the enterprise.

As adoption of agentic AI occurs, security leaders are asking very concrete questions:

  • How do I discover all the AI agents operating across my organization?
  • Who is the human owner accountable for each agent’s behavior?
  • What actions are AI agents taking, and are they in compliance with my company’s policies?
  • What permissions do our AI agents have right now, and how do those permissions evolve dynamically?
  • How do I enforce least privilege when agents are autonomous, scalable, and ephemeral?

Unfortunately, AI agents don’t fit neatly into existing security models for humans and machines. They are hyper-scale, dynamic, and short-lived entities, yet they often hold powerful access to critical systems. And if their privileges aren’t carefully monitored and appropriately constrained, organizations can be left exposed to escalation attacks, data breaches, and other security incidents.

Treating AI agents like service accounts, workloads, or applications isn’t enough, and for many CISOs, agentic AI security is now one of their most significant security challenges. Overcoming this challenge in 2026 will require a trusted partner, but for many, choosing that vendor will be easier said than done, especially as the AI agent security market becomes supersaturated.

A crowded market: why consolidation is coming

Imagine you’re one of those CISOs or a technology decision maker. You know AI adoption is mandatory. The business expects it. Your customers are asking about your offerings. Meanwhile, your developers are already shipping it. But the risk profile is fundamentally different from anything you’ve managed before.

Who can you turn to?

Almost every security vendor today claims to have a solution for AI agent security. Traditional security and identity vendors promise extensions of existing products. Cloud and infrastructure providers embed AI agent controls into their platforms. Startups are emerging or pivoting to focus exclusively on securing AI agents.

All this activity signifies real industry momentum, but consolidation efforts are happening in parallel.

Large vendors are racing to complete their offerings through fast acquisitions rather than building everything organically. The market is moving too quickly, and existing point solutions alone can’t scale to meet today’s demand. Over time, there may be room for one or two well-funded startups to carve out a meaningful share, but the broader direction is unmistakable.

Security for AI agents won’t live in isolation. It will become part of a broader security platform, with identity, access, and privilege serving as foundational controls.

The trust challenge in choosing a security partner for AI agents

This year, buyers’ most important questions will move beyond “Do you have this feature?” or “Is your platform the most comprehensive one available today?”  to “Who can I trust to walk with me on this journey?”

From that initial question, decision makers will ask vendors if they can:

  • Provide a holistic solution, not just today, but as this technology and its security requirements evolve
  • Understand identity across humans, machines, workloads, and autonomous agents
  • Enforce control without slowing innovation
  • Assist the shift from experimentation to safe, scalable production

As teams consider the right provider for agentic AI security in 2026, these questions will become driving forces.

The right solution for the right level of privilege controls

Teams looking to capitalize on the potential of AI agents in 2026 can’t afford to be lax on security. These autonomous AI systems never sleep, but they act like privileged users at machine speed. They are, in fact, the next evolution of machine identities, and they amplify multiple existing challenges across privilege, accountability, access control, governance, and trust at scale.

This is where CyberArk’s role in the market becomes very clear.

For more than 25 years, CyberArk has been a trusted partner for organizations protecting their most critical identities and privileged access. The company has witnessed multiple technological shifts, from traditional IT to cloud, DevOps, and machine identities, consistently helping enterprises adapt their security models without disrupting business operations.

Now that AI agents are entering enterprise environments, we’re extending our proven identity security foundation to provide guardrails for this new class of autonomous digital citizens. Through discovery, visibility, clear ownership, and zero trust and least privilege principles, organizations can maintain continuous control over agentic AI, even in dynamic, non-deterministic environments.

In a rapidly evolving security market crowded with hype and promise, a proven track record matters in 2026 more than ever. As AI agents move into production this year with unprecedented speed, scale, and scope, that level of experience will become the deciding factor.

Shay Saffer is VP of Machine Identity Solutions at CyberArk.