Advancing the Science of AI Security
The HiddenLayer AI Security Research team uncovers vulnerabilities, develops defenses, and shapes global standards to ensure AI remains secure, trustworthy, and resilient.



Turning Discovery Into Defense
Our mission is to identify and neutralize emerging AI threats before they impact the world. The HiddenLayer AI Security Research team investigates adversarial techniques, supply chain compromises, and agentic AI risks, transforming findings into actionable security advancements that power the HiddenLayer AI Security Platform and inform global policy.
Our AI Security Research Team
HiddenLayer’s research team combines offensive security experience, academic rigor, and a deep understanding of machine learning systems.

Kenneth Yeung
Senior AI Security Researcher

Conor McCauley
Adversarial Machine Learning Researcher

Jim Simpson
Principal Intel Analyst

Jason Martin
Director, Adversarial Research

Andrew Davis
Chief Data Scientist

Marta Janus
Principal Security Researcher
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Eoin Wickens
Director of Threat Intelligence

Kieran Evans
Principal Security Researcher

Ryan Tracey
Principal Security Researcher
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Kasimir Schulz
Director, Security Research
Our Impact by the Numbers
Quantifying the reach and influence of HiddenLayer’s AI Security Research.
Reduction in exposure to AI exploits
Disclosed through our security research
Issued patents
In the News
HiddenLayer’s research is shaping global conversations about AI security and trust.

HiddenLayer “Awardable” for Department of Defense Work in the CDAO’s Tradewinds Solutions Marketplace
AUSTIN, TX – June 2, 2026 – HiddenLayer, a leading provider of AI security solutions for enterprises and government organizations, today announced that it has achieved Awardable status through the Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office’s (CDAO) Tradewinds Solutions Marketplace.
The Tradewinds Solutions Marketplace is the premier offering of Tradewinds, the Department of Defense’s (DoD’s) suite of tools and services designed to accelerate the procurement and adoption of Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML), data, and analytics capabilities.
HiddenLayer’s platform is designed to secure AI systems and AI Agents throughout the entire AI lifecycle by providing detection, monitoring, and protection against emerging AI threats and vulnerabilities. HiddenLayer supports organizations across the public and private sectors in safely deploying and operationalizing AI technologies.
“We are honored to receive Awardable status through the Tradewinds Solutions Marketplace,” said Christopher Sestito, CEO and Co-Founder at HiddenLayer. “As AI adoption accelerates across the federal government and national security community, securing AI systems and AI Agents is mission-critical. This designation reinforces our commitment to helping government organizations confidently adopt AI technologies while protecting them from evolving threats.”
HiddenLayer’s video describing the AI Security Platform is accessible to government customers through the Tradewinds Solutions Marketplace and demonstrates how organizations can strengthen the security and resilience of AI and machine learning systems against adversarial attacks, model compromise, and emerging AI-specific cyber risks.
HiddenLayer was recognized among a competitive field of applicants whose solutions demonstrated innovation, scalability, and potential impact on national security missions. Government customers interested in viewing the video solution can create a Tradewinds Solutions Marketplace account at www.tradewindai.com.
About HiddenLayer
HiddenLayer protects predictive, generative, and agentic AI applications across the entire AI lifecycle, from discovery and AI supply chain security to attack simulation and runtime protection. Backed by patented technology and industry-leading adversarial AI research, our platform is purpose-built to defend AI systems against evolving threats. HiddenLayer protects intellectual property, helps ensure regulatory compliance, and enables organizations to safely adopt and scale AI with confidence.
About the Tradewinds Solutions Marketplace
The Tradewinds Solutions Marketplace is a digital repository of post-competition, readily awardable pitch videos that address the Department of Defense’s most significant challenges in the Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning (AI/ML), data, and analytics space. All awardable solutions have been assessed through complex scoring rubrics and competitive procedures and are available to government customers with a Marketplace account. Tradewinds is housed within the DoD’s Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office (CDAO).
Media Contact
SutherlandGold for HiddenLayer
hiddenlayer@sutherlandgold.com
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HiddenLayer Unveils New Agentic Runtime Security Capabilities for Securing Autonomous AI Execution
Austin, TX – March 23, 2026 – HiddenLayer, the leading AI security company, today announced the next generation of its AI Runtime Security module, introducing new capabilities designed to protect autonomous AI agents as they make decisions and take action. As enterprises increasingly adopt agentic AI systems, these capabilities extend HiddenLayer’s AI Runtime Security platform to secure what matters most in agentic AI: how agents behave and take actions.
The update introduces three core capabilities for securing agentic AI workloads:
• Agentic Runtime Visibility
• Agentic Investigation & Threat Hunting
• Agentic Detection & Enforcement
One in eight AI breaches are linked to agentic systems, according to HiddenLayer’s 2026 AI Threat Landscape Report. Each agent interaction expands the operational blast radius and introduces new forms of runtime risk. Yet most AI security controls stop at prompts, policies, or static permissions, and execution-time behavior remains largely unobserved and uncontrolled.
These new agentic security capabilities give security teams visibility into how agents execute. They enable them to detect and stop risks in multi-step autonomous workflows, including prompt injection, malicious tool calls, and data exfiltration before sensitive information is exposed.
“AI agents operate at machine speed. If they’re compromised, they can access systems, move data, and take action in seconds — far faster than any human could intervene,” said Chris Sestito, CEO of HiddenLayer. “That velocity changes the security equation entirely. Agentic Runtime Security gives enterprises the real-time visibility and control they need to stop damage before it spreads.”
With these new capabilities, security teams can:
- Gain complete runtime visibility into AI agent behavior — Reconstruct every session to see how agents interact with data, tools, and other agents, providing full operational context behind every action and decision.
- Investigate and hunt across agentic activity — Search, filter, and pivot across sessions, tools, and execution paths to identify anomalous behavior and uncover evolving threats. Validated findings can be easily operationalized into enforceable runtime policies, reducing friction between investigation and response.
- Detect and prevent multi-step agentic threats — Identify prompt injections, malicious tool calls, data exfiltration, and cascading attack chains unique to autonomous agents, ensuring real-time protection from evolving risks.
- Enforce adaptive security policies in real time — Automatically control agent access, redact sensitive data, and block unsafe or unauthorized actions based on context, keeping operations compliant and contained.
“As we expand the use of AI agents across our business, maintaining control and oversight is critical,” said Charles Iheagwara, AI/ML Security Leader at AstraZeneca. "Our goal is to have full scope visibility across all platforms and silos, so we’re focused on putting capabilities in place to monitor agent execution and ensure they operate safely and reliably at scale.”
Agentic Runtime Security supports enterprises as they expand agentic AI adoption, integrating directly into agent gateways and execution frameworks to enable phased deployment without application rewrites.
“Agentic AI changes the risk model because decisions and actions are happening continuously at runtime,” said Caroline Wong, Chief Strategy Officer at Axari. “HiddenLayer’s new capabilities give us the visibility into agent behavior that’s been missing, so we can safely move these systems into production with more confidence.”
The new agentic capabilities for HiddenLayer’s AI Runtime Security are available now as part of HiddenLayer’s AI Security Platform, enabling organizations to gain immediate agentic runtime visibility and detection and expand to full threat-hunting and enforcement as their AI agent programs mature.
Find more information at hiddenlayer.com/agents and contact sales@hiddenlayer.com to schedule a demo.

HiddenLayer Releases the 2026 AI Threat Landscape Report, Spotlighting the Rise of Agentic AI and the Expanding Attack Surface of Autonomous Systems
HiddenLayer secures agentic, generative, and predictAutonomous agents now account for more than 1 in 8 reported AI breaches as enterprises move from experimentation to production.
March 18, 2026 – Austin, TX – HiddenLayer, the leading AI security company protecting enterprises from adversarial machine learning and emerging AI-driven threats, today released its 2026 AI Threat Landscape Report, a comprehensive analysis of the most pressing risks facing organizations as AI systems evolve from assistive tools to autonomous agents capable of independent action.
Based on a survey of 250 IT and security leaders, the report reveals a growing tension at the heart of enterprise AI adoption: organizations are embedding AI deeper into critical operations while simultaneously expanding their exposure to entirely new attack surfaces.
While agentic AI remains in the early stages of enterprise deployment, the risks are already materializing. One in eight reported AI breaches is now linked to agentic systems, signaling that security frameworks and governance controls are struggling to keep pace with AI’s rapid evolution. As these systems gain the ability to browse the web, execute code, access tools, and carry out multi-step workflows, their autonomy introduces new vectors for exploitation and real-world system compromise.
“Agentic AI has evolved faster in the past 12 months than most enterprise security programs have in the past five years,” said Chris Sestito, CEO and Co-founder of HiddenLayer. “It’s also what makes them risky. The more authority you give these systems, the more reach they have, and the more damage they can cause if compromised. Security has to evolve without limiting the very autonomy that makes these systems valuable.”
Other findings in the report include:
AI Supply Chain Exposure Is Widening
- Malware hidden in public model and code repositories emerged as the most cited source of AI-related breaches (35%).
- Yet 93% of respondents continue to rely on open repositories for innovation, revealing a trade-off between speed and security.
Visibility and Transparency Gaps Persist
- Over a third (31%) of organizations do not know whether they experienced an AI security breach in the past 12 months.
- Although 85% support mandatory breach disclosure, more than half (53%) admit they have withheld breach reporting due to fear of backlash, underscoring a widening hypocrisy between transparency advocacy and real-world behavior.
Shadow AI Is Accelerating Across Enterprises
- Over 3 in 4 (76%) of organizations now cite shadow AI as a definite or probable problem, up from 61% in 2025, a 15-point year-over-year increase and one of the largest shifts in the dataset.
- Yet only one-third (34%) of organizations partner externally for AI threat detection, indicating that awareness is accelerating faster than governance and detection mechanisms.
Ownership and Investment Remain Misaligned
- While many organizations recognize AI security risks, internal responsibility remains unclear with 73% reporting internal conflict over ownership of AI security controls.
- Additionally, while 91% of organizations added AI security budgets for 2025, more than 40% allocated less than 10% of their budget on AI security.
“One of the clearest signals in this year’s research is how fast AI has evolved from simple chat interfaces to fully agentic systems capable of autonomous action,” said Marta Janus, Principal Security Researcher at HiddenLayer. “As soon as agents can browse the web, execute code, and trigger real-world workflows, prompt injection is no longer just a model flaw. It becomes an operational security risk with direct paths to system compromise. The rise of agentic AI fundamentally changes the threat model, and most enterprise controls were not designed for software that can think, decide, and act on its own.”
What’s New in AI: Key Trends Shaping the 2026 Threat Landscape
Over the past year, three major shifts have expanded both the power, and the risk, of enterprise AI deployments:
- Agentic AI systems moved rapidly from experimentation to production in 2025. These agents can browse the web, execute code, access files, and interact with other agents—transforming prompt injection, supply chain attacks, and misconfigurations into pathways for real-world system compromise.
- Reasoning and self-improving models have become mainstream, enabling AI systems to autonomously plan, reflect, and make complex decisions. While this improves accuracy and utility, it also increases the potential blast radius of compromise, as a single manipulated model can influence downstream systems at scale.
- Smaller, highly specialized “edge” AI models are increasingly deployed on devices, vehicles, and critical infrastructure, shifting AI execution away from centralized cloud controls. This decentralization introduces new security blind spots, particularly in regulated and safety-critical environments.
The report finds that security controls, authentication, and monitoring have not kept pace with this growth, leaving many organizations exposed by default.
HiddenLayer’s AI Security Platform secures AI systems across the full AI lifecycle with four integrated modules: AI Discovery, which identifies and inventories AI assets across environments to give security teams complete visibility into their AI footprint; AI Supply Chain Security, which evaluates the security and integrity of models and AI artifacts before deployment; AI Attack Simulation, which continuously tests AI systems for vulnerabilities and unsafe behaviors using adversarial techniques; and AI Runtime Security, which monitors models in production to detect and stop attacks in real time.
Access the full report here.
About HiddenLayer
ive AI applications across the entire AI lifecycle, from discovery and AI supply chain security to attack simulation and runtime protection. Backed by patented technology and industry-leading adversarial AI research, our platform is purpose-built to defend AI systems against evolving threats. HiddenLayer protects intellectual property, helps ensure regulatory compliance, and enables organizations to safely adopt and scale AI with confidence.
Contact
SutherlandGold for HiddenLayer
hiddenlayer@sutherlandgold.com
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