Cisco completed its acquisition of Astrix Security on June 29, 2026, adding non-human identity (NHI) governance to its zero trust portfolio. The deal, announced on May 4, positions Cisco to secure the growing population of AI agents, API keys, service accounts, and OAuth tokens that operate alongside human employees in enterprise environments.
The acquisition addresses a significant gap in enterprise security posture. Cisco’s own AI Readiness Index found that only 24 percent of organizations have the guardrails and live monitoring required to control AI agent actions. As autonomous agents proliferate across business processes, the credentials they use become high-value targets that traditional identity and access management platforms were not designed to govern.
Astrix’s capabilities include discovery and lifecycle management for agentic access, threat detection for compromised credentials and out-of-scope agent behavior, and centralized secrets management across vaults and cloud environments. These capabilities will integrate into Cisco Identity Intelligence and extend into Cisco Secure Access and Duo IAM.
Peter Bailey, SVP and GM of Security at Cisco, stated: “Securing AI agents and non-human identities has never been more important.” The integration enables organizations to discover, authenticate, authorize, and monitor AI agent identities across enterprise systems, extending zero trust principles to what Cisco calls the “agentic workforce.”
For defenders, the immediate action is to inventory non-human identities across their environments. Organizations that lack visibility into how many service accounts, API tokens, and agent credentials operate in their infrastructure face growing exposure as AI agent adoption accelerates through 2026 and beyond.
