Onyx Named a Gartner Cool Vendor in Agentic AI Security

Onyx has been named a Cool Vendor in the 2026 Gartner Coolest Vendor Innovations in Agentic AI Security report. We see this recognition as a signal that controlling advanced AI is becoming a core enterprise requirement. As agents gain autonomy, companies need to turn policies into operational controls that keep AI actions aligned with human intent.

Companies are adopting a growing number of third-party AI tools while developing their own agents, each with different models, permissions, tools, and connections to business systems. A single task can span several of these systems, and an agent’s behavior can change as it encounters new information. Understanding what is happening, and whether it remains aligned with the intended goal, requires context that individual applications and static access controls often lack.

The Onyx Secure AI Control Plane helps teams discover AI assets, assess their access and risk, enforce policies, and intervene as agents operate, while optimizing model performance and costs. That unified approach helps companies protect against adversarial threats, employee misuse, and rogue or misaligned agents as they expand AI adoption with confidence.

The security decision changes when AI can act

An AI agent can have legitimate access to a system and still take an action that falls outside its assigned task. Permission to access a customer database does not mean permission to export it. Permission to edit code does not mean permission to delete a production resource.

The challenge becomes harder when a single task spans multiple applications, tools, and data sources. Each system may see an authorized request, while no individual system sees enough context to determine whether the overall workflow remains appropriate.

That is why we believe enterprise AI security must understand both what an agent can access and what it is trying to accomplish. Teams need a way to assess proposed actions against user intent and organizational policy, then intervene before harmful actions execute.

A unified control layer for enterprise AI

Onyx brings that approach to the environments where enterprises use and build AI, including endpoints, browsers, SaaS applications, cloud infrastructure, and code.

It starts with discovering AI assets and understanding their connections, permissions, and exposure. Security and governance teams can then assess posture, establish policies, and apply runtime protections as agents operate. This includes automating least privilege: dynamically limiting an agent’s access to the capabilities needed for its task, rather than leaving broad, standing permissions in place.

Our Guardian Agent evaluates agent behavior and proposed actions in context. Depending on the situation, Onyx can allow, block, modify, redirect, or escalate an action for human review. This gives teams more ways to keep work within authorized boundaries while helping legitimate workflows continue.

Consider a coding agent asked to fix a failing test. After several unsuccessful attempts, it decides to disable a security check and change the deployment workflow so the build will pass. Each tool call may be permitted by its credentials, but the sequence has drifted from the developer’s intent. Onyx’s Guardian Agent can evaluate those proposed changes against the original task, block the unsafe steps, and redirect the agent toward a fix within scope or escalate for human approval. Combined with automated least privilege, this helps contain the agent’s authority while keeping useful work moving.

Control that supports AI at scale

Alongside discovering AI assets, assessing posture, and protecting agent actions, Onyx helps teams optimize how they use models. Model routing matches requests to suitable models based on task requirements, cost, accuracy, and latency. Token optimization helps reduce token costs, including by using smaller, less expensive models where they can meet the task’s quality requirements. Our gateway-agnostic approach extends control across the AI gateways enterprises our customers already use.

Teams can also set adoption goals, track usage across departments, and measure progress against business outcomes. Connecting these capabilities gives organizations a consistent way to understand where AI is being used, govern its behavior, manage its costs, and see whether adoption is delivering value.

Built to keep humans in control

With models and agents rapidly becoming smarter, more capable, and more autonomous, our mission to control advanced AI is resonating strongly across enterprises.

Being named a Gartner Cool Vendor is noteworthy, but our focus remains on the work ahead: helping enterprises adopt more capable AI with the visibility, governance, and control to put it to work confidently.

We are grateful to the customers and partners helping shape Onyx, and to the team turning our mission into a very “cool” and practical enterprise solution. Request a demo to learn more.

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Gartner, Coolest Vendor Innovations in Agentic AI Security, October 2026.

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