Accelerating AI Initiatives with Zero Trust

Act Fast. Stay Secure. This is the critical mission for enterprise organizations in the rapidly evolving world of AI. Today we launch exciting new innovations to Zscaler’s AI security portfolio, paving the way for accelerating AI initiatives with confidence. 

Since Chat GPT’s debut three short years ago, the proliferation of AI in various forms is unlike anything the tech world has ever seen. It began with several GenAI apps that greatly improved productivity. Then AI became embedded in just about every SaaS app we use today, such as Microsoft Office, Salesforce, Atlassian and more. Today most organizations have a strategic initiative to build and deploy custom enterprise AI applications to maintain a competitive advantage. And now we are seeing the rapid emergence of agentic AI, where the promise of autonomous agents can greatly accelerate productivity. 

The AI Security Gap: A Roadblock to Innovation

While the rapid pace of AI innovation is exciting, the reality is that traditional security has not kept pace - creating friction as organizations strive to migrate from prototypes to production. Security leaders face a number of challenges, including:

• AI sprawl has dramatically expanded the attack surface, increasing risks of data exposure;
• AI introduces new classes of attacks, such as prompt injection and context poisoning, which bypass traditional controls;
• New protocols, such as MCP, A2A, and websockets make AI interactions harder to inspect and secure; and
• Agentic AI ushers in a new frontier, where autonomous agents with excessive permissions could wreak havoc if not kept in check.

Given the competitive landscape, the question for security teams is not whether to adopt AI, but how to do so securely, consistently, and at enterprise scale as business leaders expect AI to drive productivity, efficiency, and growth. This requires organizations to rethink their security frameworks to align with the new dynamic AI era.

Based on the Zero Trust Exchange platform, Zscaler’s AI Security portfolio is designed to address the full range of requirements to safeguard an organization’s AI journey. 

1. Asset Management - Gain full visibility of your AI footprint and risks
2. Secure Access to AI - Ensure the safe and responsible use of AI
3. Safeguard AI Apps and Infrastructure - Secure the full AI lifecycle from development through deployment. 
    

Zscaler is unveiling innovations across all of these critical pillars.
 

AI Asset Management

Zscaler’s existing platform provides granular visibility into the use of GenAI apps. However, the reality today is that many traditional SaaS apps are embedding AI capabilities, which creates a unique blind spot. These apps may have the same URL as their parent SaaS app, but are in fact AI, adding to the shadow AI challenge. Zscaler has enhanced its solution to provide this additional level of visibility, mitigating these new risks. 

In addition to understanding the use of AI, most enterprises struggle to understand all of the AI applications and infrastructure deployed throughout their organization. Developer tools, AI models, MCP servers, and agent platforms can quickly proliferate without proper oversight. Zscaler’s new solution is pulling together a 360 degree view of your entire AI footprint leveraging a wide range of telemetry, including insights from the Zscaler platform, scanning of cloud AI platforms, code repositories and more. From these insights, Zscaler identifies the MCP servers, agents and models deployed throughout the organization and how they are interconnected - uncovering data and AI pipeline risks. In addition, Zscaler uncovers hidden risks and vulnerabilities such as posture misconfigurations, model risks, supply chain risks and more. 
 

Secure Access to AI Apps and Models

Zscaler pioneered Zero Trust Exchange for secure access and eliminating risks including lateral threat movement and more to secure their users, workloads and branches. Now, with the AI Security platform, we have extended our Zero Trust Exchange for secure access to AI apps and models everywhere. Secure access to AI includes the following: 

• Access controls: Identify and secure access to AI apps including embedded AI apps with inline DLP.
• Advanced intent-based detectors: Safeguard user interactions with AI apps to moderate content (e.g., prevent off topic prompts) and prevent threats (e.g., responses with malicious content).
• Prompt extraction and classification: Extract and classify prompts from the request and response of dozens of Gen AI apps for insights into usage patterns.
• Secure access to AI development environments: Ensure zero trust based access to development environments, enforcing access controls for IDE applications accessing AI infrastructure to prevent data and PII leakage as well as security threats.

Secure AI apps and Infrastructure

The dynamic nature of AI has radically impacted the app development process. Frequently updating models, rapidly expanding attack surfaces and new attack methods outpace traditional scanning and posture management tools. 

With our recent acquisition of SPLX, Zscaler now has one of the most advanced AI red teaming solutions in the market, specifically designed to address these new challenges. Harnessing over 5000 simulated attacks across a range of categories, our red teaming solution helps uncover and remediate vulnerabilities in real time. Insights can be leveraged to harden system prompts, improving system performance across a number of dimensions. This overall approach provides value throughout the lifecycle of an AI system, from build to deploy to runtime, ensuring continuous protection.

Once applications are deployed, Zscaler offers ongoing robust runtime protection, including:

• AI Guard: Zscaler is announcing general availability of its AI guard solution. With a deep bench of prompt and response detectors, AI guardrails safeguard interactions between AI apps and models. The solution blocks malicious attacks, such as prompt injections and jailbreaks. It also moderates prompt responses to ensure your applications are aligned with corporate policies, including factors such as toxicity, competition or brand and reputation.
• Policy Generator for Automated AI Guardrails: Zscaler is also introducing a new integration between our red teaming and AI guard solutions. This feature leverages red team findings to automatically generate guardrail policies, closing the loop between testing and enforcement.

Zscaler’s AI security portfolio also addresses governance and compliance, with built-in frameworks for EU AI Act, NIST AI RMF, OWASP Top 10 and other popular regulations.  This enables organizations to quickly test and assess for compliance and remediate any gaps.

The way forward

For almost twenty years, organizations have relied on Zscaler to streamline and secure digital transformation, transitioning from legacy infrastructure to a cloud-native platform. A similar paradigm shift is currently occurring with the adoption of AI. Just as Zero Trust architecture established the cornerstone for a new era of security, enterprises must now extend this fundamental principle to safeguard their AI transformation. Zscaler’s proven scalability, unified platform approach and ability to address the full range of AI requirements makes us an ideal partner for your AI journey.
 

Ready to See It in Action?

We invite you to learn more about our AI Security portfolio, and request a demo to see how Zscaler can help you accelerate your AI initiatives.

Forward-Looking Statements

This blog post contains forward-looking statements that are based on our management's beliefs and assumptions and on information currently available to our management. These forward-looking statements include the expected benefits of the expansion of our AI Security portfolio and the solutions and protections offered to our customers. These forward-looking statements are subject to the safe harbor provisions created by the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. A significant number of factors could cause actual results to differ materially from statements made in this blog post, including those factors related to our ability to successfully integrate new features of our product offerings into our AI Security portfolio and the business impact additional offerings may have for our customers. Additional risks and uncertainties are set forth in our most recent Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission (“SEC”) on November 25, 2025, which is available on our website at ir.zscaler.com and on the SEC's website at www.sec.gov. Any forward-looking statements in this blog post are based on the limited information currently available to Zscaler as of the date hereof, which is subject to change, and Zscaler will not necessarily update the information, even if new information becomes available in the future.