Cequence Security tackles AI bot management challenges

Cequence Security, a pioneer in API security and bot management, announces significant enhancements to its Unified API Protection (UAP) platform to deliver the industry’s first comprehensive security solution for agentic AI development, usage, and connectivity.

This enhancement empowers organisations to secure every AI agent interaction, regardless of the development framework. By implementing robust guardrails, the solution protects both enterprise-hosted AI applications and external AI APIs, preventing sensitive data exfiltration through business logic abuse and ensuring regulatory compliance.

Ensuring regulatory compliance

There is no AI without APIs, and the rapid growth of agentic AI applications has amplified concerns about securing sensitive data during their interactions. These AI-driven exchanges can inadvertently expose internal systems, create significant vulnerabilities, and jeopardise valuable data assets.

This new layer of security enables customers to detect and prevent AI bots such as ChatGPT

Recognising this critical challenge, Cequence has expanded its UAP platform, introducing an enhanced security layer to govern interactions between AI agents and backend services specifically.

This new layer of security enables customers to detect and prevent AI bots, such as ChatGPT from OpenAI and Perplexity from harvesting organisational data. 

Unidentified user agents

Internal telemetry across Global 2000 deployments shows that the overwhelming majority of AI-related bot traffic, nearly 88%, originates from large language model infrastructure, with most requests obfuscated behind generic or unidentified user agents.

Less than 4% of this traffic is transparently attributed to bots like GPTBot or Gemini. Cequence’s ability to detect and govern this traffic in real time, despite the lack of clear identifiers, reinforces the platform’s unmatched readiness for securing agentic AI in the wild.

External AI harvesting attempts

Key enhancements to Cequence’s UAP platform include:

• Block unauthorised AI data harvesting: Understanding that external AI often seeks to learn by broadly collecting data without obtaining permission, Cequence provides organisations with the critical capability to manage which AI, if any, can interact with their proprietary information.
• Detect and prevent sensitive data exposure: Empowers organisations to effectively detect and prevent sensitive data exposure across all forms of agentic AI. This includes safeguarding against external AI harvesting attempts and securing data within internal AI applications. The platform's intelligent analysis automatically differentiates between legitimate data access during normal application usage and anomalous activities signalling sensitive data exfiltration, ensuring comprehensive protection against AI-related data loss.
• Discover and manage shadow AI: Automatically discovers and classifies APIs from agentic AI tools like Microsoft Copilot and Salesforce Agentforce, presenting a unified view alongside customers’ internal and third-party APIs. This comprehensive visibility empowers organisations to easily manage these interactions and effectively detect and block sensitive data leaks, whether from external AI harvesting or internal AI usage.
• Seamless integration: Integrates easily into DevOps frameworks for discovering internal AI applications and generates OpenAPI specifications that detail API schemas and security mechanisms, including strong authentication and security policies. Cequence delivers powerful protection without relying on third-party tools, while seamlessly integrating with the customer’s existing cybersecurity ecosystem. This simplifies management and security enforcement.

Enterprise software applications

"Gartner® predicts that by 2028, 33% of enterprise software applications will include agentic AI, up from less than 1% in 2024, enabling 15% of day-to-day work decisions to be made autonomously. We’ve taken immediate action to extend our market-renowned API security and bot management capabilities," said Ameya Talwalkar, CEO of Cequence.

Ameya Talwalkar adds, "Agentic AI introduces a new layer of complexity, where every agent behaves like a bidirectional API. That’s our wheelhouse. Our platform helps organisations embrace innovation at scale without sacrificing governance, compliance, or control."

These extended capabilities will be generally available in June.