Securing Brokers & AI Provide Chain with Cisco AI Protection

The dialog round AI and its enterprise functions has quickly shifted focus to AI brokers—autonomous AI methods that aren’t solely able to conversing, but additionally reasoning, planning, and executing autonomous actions. 

Our Cisco AI Readiness Index 2025 underscores this pleasure, as 83% of corporations surveyed already intend to develop or deploy AI brokers throughout a wide range of use instances. On the similar time, these companies are clear about their sensible challenges: infrastructure limitations, workforce planning gaps, and naturally, safety. 

At a time limit the place many safety groups are nonetheless contending with AI safety at a excessive degree, brokers broaden the AI threat floor even additional. In spite of everything, a chatbot can say one thing dangerous, however an AI agent can do one thing dangerous. 

We launched Cisco AI Protection firstly of this 12 months as our reply to AI threat—a really complete safety resolution for the event and deployment of enterprise AI functions. As this threat floor grows, we need to spotlight how AI Protection has advanced to fulfill these challenges head-on with AI provide chain scanning and purpose-built runtime protections for AI brokers. 

Under, we’ll share actual examples of AI provide chain and agent vulnerabilities, unpack their potential implications for enterprise functions, and share how AI Protection allows companies to straight mitigate these dangers. 

Figuring out vulnerabilities in your AI provide chain 

Trendy AI growth depends on a myriad of third-party and open-source elements reminiscent of fashions and datasets. With the appearance of AI brokers, that record has grown to incorporate belongings like MCP servers, instruments, and extra. 

Whereas they make AI growth extra accessible and environment friendly than ever, third-party AI belongings introduce threat. A compromised part within the provide chain successfully undermines all the system, creating alternatives for code execution, delicate information exfiltration, and different insecure outcomes. 

This isn’t simply theoretical, both. A number of months in the past, researchers at Koi Safety recognized the primary recognized malicious MCP server within the wild. This bundle, which had already garnered 1000’s of downloads, included malicious code to discreetly BCC an unsanctioned third-party on each single electronic mail. Comparable malicious inclusions have been present in open-source fashions, device information, and numerous different AI belongings. 

Cisco AI Protection will straight handle AI provide chain threat by scanning mannequin information and MCP servers in enterprise repositories to establish and flag potential vulnerabilities. 

By surfacing potential points like mannequin manipulation, arbitrary code execution, information exfiltration, and gear compromise, our resolution helps forestall AI builders from constructing with insecure elements. By integrating provide chain scanning tightly inside the growth lifecycle, companies can construct and deploy AI functions on a dependable and safe basis. 

Safeguarding AI brokers with purpose-built protections 

A manufacturing AI utility is vulnerable to any variety of explicitly malicious assaults or unintentionally dangerous outcomes—immediate injections, information leakage, toxicity, denial of service, and extra. 

After we launched Cisco AI Protection, our runtime safety guardrails have been particularly designed to guard in opposition to these situations. Bi-directional inspection and filtering prevented dangerous content material from each person prompts and mannequin responses, conserving interactions with enterprise AI functions protected and safe. 

With agentic AI and the introduction of multi-agent methods, there are new vectors to think about: higher entry to delicate information, autonomous decision-making, and complicated interactions between human customers, brokers, and instruments. 

To fulfill this rising threat, Cisco AI Protection has advanced with purpose-built runtime safety for brokers. AI Protection will perform as a form of MCP gateway, intercepting calls between an agent and MCP server to fight new threats like device compromise. 

Let’s drill into an instance to higher perceive it. Think about a device which brokers leverage to look and summarize content material on the net. One of many web sites searched comprises discreet directions to hijack the AI, a well-recognized situation often known as an “oblique immediate injection.” 

With easy AI chatbots, oblique immediate injections may unfold misinformation, elicit a dangerous response, or distribute a phishing hyperlink. With brokers, the potential grows—the immediate may instruct the AI to steal delicate information, distribute malicious emails, or hijack a related device.  

Cisco AI Protection will shield these agentic interactions on two fronts. Our beforehand current AI guardrails will monitor interactions between the applying and mannequin, simply as they’ve since day one. Our new, purpose-built agentic guardrails will look at interactions between the mannequin and MCP server to make sure that these too are protected and safe. 

Our purpose with these new capabilities is unchanged—we need to allow companies to deploy and innovate with AI confidently and with out concern. Cisco stays on the forefront of AI safety analysis, collaborating with AI requirements our bodies, main enterprises, and even partnering with Hugging Face to scan each public file uploaded to the world’s largest AI repository. Combining this experience with a long time of Cisco’s networking management, AI Protection delivers an AI safety resolution that’s complete and completed at a community degree.   

For these all for MCP safety, take a look at an open-source model of our MCP Scanner which you could get began with right now. Enterprises searching for a extra complete resolution to handle their AI and agentic safety issues ought to schedule time with an knowledgeable from our crew. 

Lots of the merchandise and options described herein stay in various phases of growth and will probably be supplied on a when-and-if-available foundation.