AI Agents Are Creating a New Layer of Cybersecurity Spending

In brief

• Akamai launched Agent Sandbox and Akamai Inference in beta on Oct. 27, adding WebAssembly-based isolation for code that AI agents write and run.
• A 2026 Palo Alto Networks survey of 2,930 security leaders found 109 machine identities per human, 79 of them AI agents.
• Palo Alto, Cisco, CrowdStrike, Okta and Zscaler have all bought or launched AI-agent security products this year.

AI-focused cloud service provider Akamai launched a sandbox for AI agents on Tuesday, a sealed environment where code an agent writes can run without touching the rest of a company's systems. Agent Sandbox is in beta, alongside Akamai Inference, a service for running open AI models on Akamai's cloud.

The launch may be small but the problem behind it is not. Software is no longer just answering questions—it logs into accounts, writes code, moves money and acts on its own, and every one of those powers is something a hacker, or the software itself, can abuse.

This is what’s known as agentic AI, and it’s taking over the internet. A 2026 Palo Alto Networks survey of 2,930 security leaders found an average of 109 machine identities for every human, the logins and keys software uses to access other software. Of those, 79 are AI agents.