Cisco announces AI Defense expansion and AI-Aware SASE

Cisco (CSCO) announced what it says is “a sweeping evolution of its security portfolio to help enterprises adopt agentic AI with confidence, combining agent protection, interaction governance, and resilient connectivity for AI-driven workflows.” The company added: In the biggest expansion since its January 2025 launch, Cisco AI Defense delivers new features to better secure agents and the AI supply chain… Together, these updates help teams inventory and govern AI assets, understand provenance, and surface vulnerabilities earlier in the AI development lifecycle. Since launch, AI Defense has mapped to leading AI frameworks from organizations like NIST, OWASP, and MITRE. The latest updates add mapping to Cisco’s new Integrated AI Security and Safety Framework to help teams better understand adversary objectives and measure risk exposure. In addition, AI Defense’s runtime protections now feature a developer-ready integration with NVIDIA NeMo Guardrails’ open source framework, offering organizations a modular, interoperable architecture to protect AI systems in real time in production.”