If there was one message emanating from day two of RSAC 2026, it was this: agentic AI security is no longer a niche concern. It’s the defining enterprise security challenge of 2026, and the industry is mobilizing fast.

From CrowdStrike’s new runtime protection tools to Palo Alto Networks’ Prisma AIRS 3.0 and a wave of vendors rethinking what “identity” means in a world of autonomous digital workers, Day 2 of the conference made clear that the security industry is finally taking AI agents seriously.

CrowdStrike: AI Runtime Protection Comes to Falcon

CrowdStrike used its RSAC 2026 presence to announce two significant additions to its Falcon platform focused specifically on AI workloads and agents.

AI Runtime Protection extends CrowdStrike’s existing EDR (Endpoint Detection and Response) capabilities to monitor and protect AI inference processes at runtime. This means Falcon can now detect anomalous behavior in running AI agents — not just traditional malware or intrusion patterns, but agent-specific threats like prompt injection, unexpected tool invocations, and unauthorized data exfiltration via agent-to-agent communication.

Shadow AI Discovery is perhaps the more immediately practical tool. Enterprises are deploying AI agents faster than their security teams can track. Shadow AI Discovery automatically catalogs AI models and agentic workloads running across an organization’s environment — whether officially sanctioned or not — giving security teams visibility they’ve been lacking.

Together, these tools represent the first serious attempt by a major EDR vendor to extend traditional endpoint security paradigms to cover agentic AI infrastructure.

Palo Alto Networks: Prisma AIRS 3.0

Announced earlier this week and prominently featured at RSAC, Palo Alto Networks released Prisma AIRS 3.0 — the latest version of its AI Runtime Security platform, now reoriented around the full agentic AI lifecycle.

Where previous versions of Prisma AIRS focused primarily on protecting AI models at inference time, version 3.0 takes a wider view. It covers:

  • Model supply chain integrity: Validating that models haven’t been tampered with before deployment
  • Agent behavior monitoring: Continuous assessment of agent actions against policy baselines
  • MCP and tool call security: Scanning Model Context Protocol calls and external tool invocations for injection attacks
  • Agentic lifecycle governance: Policy enforcement across the entire agent lifecycle from provisioning to decommission

The MCP security angle is particularly significant given Figma’s just-announced MCP server (which we’re also covering this cycle). As MCP becomes a standard integration layer for agentic systems, securing those interfaces becomes a critical priority.

The Agent Identity Problem

Running as a thread through several Day 2 sessions was a question that the security industry has largely sidestepped: who — or what — is an AI agent?

Multiple vendors, including biometric specialists and enterprise identity providers, rolled out new approaches to agent authentication. The challenge is real: traditional identity systems were built for humans. Certificates and service accounts can handle machine identity, but autonomous agents operating across multiple systems and sessions present new complications.

Key questions being worked through at RSAC included:

  • How do you verify that the agent making a request is the same agent that was authorized, and hasn’t been compromised?
  • How do you handle agent-to-agent delegation without creating privilege escalation paths?
  • What does non-repudiation look like for actions taken by autonomous agents?

Biometric authentication vendors are extending their platforms to handle “digital worker” identity alongside human identity. The approaches vary — some use cryptographic attestation of agent state, others bind agents to specific hardware or infrastructure identifiers — but the recognition that this is a solved-differently problem is encouraging.

The Bigger Picture

SiliconAngle’s Day 2 analysis captured the central tension well: the technology industry is selling agentic security at speed, but enterprise buyers are still catching up. There’s a gap between the sophistication of the tools being announced and the operational readiness of most organizations to deploy them.

That gap matters. An enterprise that deploys powerful agentic AI infrastructure before their security posture is ready for it is creating exactly the kind of attack surface that CrowdStrike, Palo Alto, and others are now racing to protect. The announcements at RSAC 2026 are encouraging — but implementation will be the hard part.

Sources

  1. SiliconAngle — Agentic Security Takes Center Stage at RSAC 2026
  2. SecurityWeek — RSAC 2026 Day 2 Roundup
  3. Palo Alto Networks — Prisma AIRS 3.0 Press Release
  4. Biometric Update — AI Agent Identity and Next-Gen Enterprise Authentication at RSAC 2026

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