Axonius Takes on Shadow AI, Turning AI Into an Asset Class for Security and IT to Finally See and Govern

NEW YORK — October 20, 2026 — Axonius, the asset intelligence platform for unified security operations and exposure management, today announced Shadow AI Discovery, AI Platforms Inventory, and AI Application Settings for the Axonius Asset Cloud. Security and IT teams can now find the AI applications, agents, models, and infrastructure running inside their environment and see how each one is configured. 

Axonius has spent years helping security and IT teams see and govern the assets that matter most, including cyber assets, cyber-physical assets, software assets, SaaS applications, and identities. AI is the newest and fastest-growing asset class spread across multiple asset types, and Axonius is giving security and IT teams one place to find, understand, and secure what's running in their environment. This is the next chapter in Axonius' ongoing work to deliver a complete, unified view of risk across every asset class.

Gartner® predicts that “by 2028, an average global Fortune 500 enterprise will have over 150,000 agents in use, up from less than 15 in 2025, generating significant agent sprawl, IT complexity and management challenges.” According to Gartner, “only 13% of organizations believe they have the right AI agent governance in place.” 

Shadow AI is where the problem is most visible, so it is where Axonius is starting. A security program cannot apply policy to AI assets it has not found in its environment. Axonius has more than 1,400 bi-directional integrations and reconciles what each one reports into a single platform that catalogs what exists, how it is configured, and who owns it. AI assets arrive with the same reconciliation problem every other asset class arrived with: the endpoint vendor sees one thing, the cloud security vendor sees another, and the identity provider sees a third. Putting AI assets into existing asset context data from the Axonius Asset Cloud means security and IT teams inherit the queries, dashboards, correlations, and enforcement actions they already run, instead of buying a separate AI inventory tool and reconciling that tool against everything else in their environment.

Axonius is introducing the following capabilities: 

• Shadow AI Discovery: Axonius now brings critical visibility into AI usage in the enterprise, including the hidden usage that can only be detected by correlating signals from multiple sources. This enables security and IT teams to instantly evaluate the status of more than 200 leading enterprise applications. Axonius’ existing depth in SaaS hygiene also allows for visibility into the AI vendors’ stance on data training, and the AI autonomy levels available within an application. 

• AI Platforms Inventory: Axonius will deepen existing bi-directional integrations into AI platforms—including Anthropic, Amazon Bedrock, OpenAI, and more—designed to uncover active models, autonomous agents, and Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers within this new ecosystem of AI assets. These integrations correlate each AI asset directly to the specific human and non-human identities (NHIs) driving them. This provides security and IT teams with total operational visibility by empowering them to establish clear ownership, enforce strict governance, and eliminate dangerous blind spots across the AI lifecycle. 

• AI Application Settings: Axonius will address the growing security exposure that AI is introducing with new configuration auditing capabilities. By reading settings directly from connected application adapters, security and IT teams can understand whether AI features have been activated and determine whether that usage is approved or unapproved. Continuously auditing these settings against compliance policies surfaces misconfigurations and policy drift, which empowers organizations to safely govern how corporate data interacts with third-party vendors.

“Every asset class we have worked on followed the same sequence. Something new shows up in the environment, it spreads faster than security and IT teams can track it, and for a year or two the only honest answer to ‘how many do we have’ is a guess. That is where AI is right now,” said Moshe Ben Simon, chief product officer at Axonius. “We are not claiming to govern AI today. We are claiming that you cannot govern what you have not found, and that finding things across systems is the problem we have spent nine years solving for. With the additions of Shadow AI Discovery, AI Platforms Inventory, and AI Application Settings for the Axonius Asset Cloud, we're giving security and IT teams the visibility they need to close shadow AI blind spots and govern AI with confidence.”

“As AI agents and models proliferate across the enterprise, security and IT teams are confronting a visibility gap that traditional asset management tools were never built to close. Organizations can't govern what they can't see,” said Michelle Abraham, research vice president at IDC. “Extending asset intelligence to cover shadow AI usage, platforms, and configurations is a necessary step for any enterprise serious about managing AI risk at scale.”

Availability

• Shadow AI Discovery is generally available to customers. 

• AI Platforms Inventory and AI Application Settings will be in preview by the end of January 2027. 

Additional Resources

• Learn more about Axonius’ approach to security for AI. 

• Read the blog to learn more about Shadow AI Discovery, AI Platforms Inventory, and AI Application Settings. 

Gartner Disclaimer

Gartner Press Release, Gartner Identifies Six Steps to Manage AI Agent Sprawl, April 28, 2026

GARTNER is a trademark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates.

About Axonius

Axonius is the asset intelligence platform for unified security operations and exposure management. The Axonius Asset Cloud is the one source of truth for assets and exposures across an organization’s entire environment, providing all the right context to prioritize risks and coordinate fixes. Cited as one of the fastest-growing cybersecurity startups, with accolades from CNBC, Forbes, and Fortune, Axonius supports millions of assets for leading customers across industries and around the world.

The power to transform asset intelligence into intelligent action. Learn more at www.axonius.com.