I’ve spent my career building solutions to protect the API fabric that powers modern businesses. I founded Salt because I saw that traditional security tools such as WAFs, gateways, and CDNs weren’t designed to see or secure APIs. That gap led to breaches, blind spots, and billions in risk.

Today, we’re facing a new wave of risk that’s even bigger than the last. The rise of Agentic AI has brought us to a true inflection point.

Agentic AI isn’t just another software layer. It’s a fundamentally new computing paradigm. These autonomous agents reason, remember, and take real-time actions across environments. They trigger workflows, access sensitive data, and update systems without a human in the loop.

They are powerful and dangerous.

And they’re all powered by APIs.

The Hard Truth: You Can’t Secure AI Without Securing APIs

Every AI agent is API-connected. Whether it’s pulling data from internal systems, issuing commands to third-party platforms, or coordinating with other agents via the Model Context Protocol (MCP), which acts as an API broker, APIs are the control plane.

But here’s the problem: most security teams still treat APIs as just another line item in the stack. Or worse, they assume their existing tools are already covering them.

They’re not.

Agentic AI magnifies every weakness in your API strategy. If you’re not seeing all the API traffic, if you’re not identifying sensitive endpoints, if you’re not understanding behavioral context, you’re flying blind while AI agents operate with full system access.

That’s not just a technical risk. It’s a life safety issue. If an AI-powered agent makes a healthcare decision based on incomplete or manipulated data, the stakes aren’t abstract. They’re personal. My own grandmother’s health relies on systems like these being secure, reliable, and trusted. I won’t accept anything less.

Why Today’s Tools Fall Short

Traditional tools were never built to handle this. They inspect traffic at the edge. They filter payloads based on static rules. But they can’t tell you:

• Which AI agents are active
• What those agents are doing
• Whether they’re acting inside or outside policy
• If rogue agents or shadow APIs are being abused
• If internal APIs are leaking sensitive context

The rise of Agentic AI means we need API security that’s real-time, behavioral, and deeply integrated into how AI agents think and act.

Our Vision: Secure the API Fabric of the Future

At Salt, we believe Agentic AI marks the beginning of a new era of software—and that era must be secured differently.

Here’s our vision:

1. ‍See the entire API fabric, instantly: AI agents operate across thousands of APIs, including internal, partner, shadow, and deprecated ones. Salt provides a complete, continuously updated map without requiring traffic or agents to start.
2. ‍Understand behavior, not just traffic: Salt goes beyond logging API calls. We understand intent, sequence, and context so we can spot anomalies that signal abuse, drift, or misalignment between agent policy and behavior.
3. ‍Secure the Model Context Protocol (MCP): MCP is becoming the lingua franca of AI agents. It defines what agents know, what actions they can take, and how they think. Salt is building the industry’s first purpose-built security for MCP traffic and agent coordination.
4. Prevent the next-generation of AI attacks: From prompt injection to API abuse, Salt detects and stops attacks that slip past traditional defenses. And we provide the intelligence you need to adapt policy in real time before incidents escalate.
5. Enable responsible AI adoption: Security can’t slow innovation. Salt is designed for speed and ease of deployment. We integrate directly with cloud environments, such as AWS, providing teams with instant visibility without disrupting operations.

The Road Ahead

We’ve entered a world where software can think and act. That’s thrilling. But it also demands a radical shift in how we think about security.

At Salt, we’re committed to leading the way. We’ll secure the AI agents reshaping how businesses operate. We’ll protect the APIs that make those agents possible. And we’ll keep building toward a future where innovation and trust go hand in hand.

Because this isn’t just about digital systems, it’s about the real-world impact they have on customers, partners, and employees.

‍

Roey Eliyahu, ‍Co-founder & CEO, Salt Security

*** This is a Security Bloggers Network syndicated blog from Salt Security blog authored by Roey Eliyahu. Read the original post at: https://salt.security/blog/securing-the-next-era-why-agentic-ai-demands-a-new-approach-to-api-security