Adversa AI Wins Award for Securing New Frontier of Autonomous AI

TEL AVIV, Israel – January 19, 2026 – In a move signaling the growing urgency to secure the next wave of artificial intelligence, Adversa AI announced its Agentic AI Security Platform has won a 2026 BIG Innovation Award. The recognition, presented by the Business Intelligence Group, highlights the critical need for new security paradigms as businesses increasingly rely on autonomous AI agents that can think, plan, and act on their own.

The award places Adversa AI in a cohort of global innovators recognized for delivering measurable, real-world impact. "This year's winners demonstrate that innovation has entered a new accountability era," said Russ Fordyce, Chief Recognition Officer at the Business Intelligence Group, underscoring a market-wide shift towards responsible and secure technological advancement.

The New Attack Surface: Securing Autonomous AI

Unlike traditional AI systems that primarily analyze data or respond to direct user commands, agentic AI represents a significant leap forward. These autonomous agents use large language models as a cognitive engine to orchestrate and execute complex tasks across a wide array of digital tools, APIs, and cloud environments. They can set their own sub-goals, interact with external systems, and adapt their behavior with limited human oversight, promising unprecedented gains in productivity and automation.

However, this autonomy creates a fundamentally new and dangerous attack surface. Security leaders are now grappling with risks that extend far beyond classic application security vulnerabilities. In a landmark effort to codify these emerging threats, the Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) published its "Top 10 for Agentic AI Applications (2026)" in December 2025. This framework, developed by over 100 industry experts, identifies critical risks that are already appearing in early deployments.

These vulnerabilities include threats like Agent Goal Hijack, where an attacker can maliciously alter an agent's core objectives, and Tool Misuse, where an agent is tricked into using its legitimate tools for destructive or unauthorized purposes. Other top risks include Identity & Privilege Abuse, Memory & Context Poisoning, and the potential for Cascading Failures, where a single compromised agent can trigger a chain reaction of system-wide failures. According to one cybersecurity analyst, "We are moving from securing static code and data to securing dynamic, decision-making entities. It's a paradigm shift that leaves many existing security tools obsolete."

A Business Imperative for the C-Suite

The challenge of securing agentic AI is rapidly escalating from a technical problem to a C-suite-level business imperative. As these autonomous systems are integrated into core business processes—from supply chain management to financial trading—the potential for catastrophic failure becomes a significant enterprise risk.

Chief Information Security Officers (CISOs) are on the front lines, facing pressure to enable AI-driven innovation while safeguarding the organization. Recent industry surveys reveal a stark preparedness gap: while a vast majority of security leaders believe AI agents introduce novel security and compliance risks, a small fraction feel they have the right tools and strategies to manage them. Key concerns revolve around data leakage through third-party tools, the lack of visibility into an agent's decision-making process, and the potential for prompt injections to grant attackers unauthorized access to sensitive systems.

Adversa AI's award-winning platform is designed specifically to address these high-stakes questions. It provides security teams with the means to operationalize the risks outlined by OWASP, turning abstract threats into repeatable and continuous testing cycles. The platform aims to help CISOs confidently answer critical questions from their boards, such as how to test agents for goal hijacking before production, how to prevent unsafe autonomous actions, and how to validate that an agent's permissions and identity boundaries are secure.

Red Teaming the Robots: A Proactive Defense

At the core of Adversa AI's strategy is the concept of "Continuous AI Red Teaming"—a proactive and adversarial approach to security. Instead of waiting for an incident to occur, this methodology involves relentlessly stress-testing AI agents and their underlying architecture to discover and fix vulnerabilities before they can be exploited by attackers.

"This award recognizes a hard reality CISOs are confronting: once AI systems can take actions, security must validate behavior—not just inputs and outputs," said Alex Polyakov, Co-Founder of Adversa AI. "We built Adversa to continuously discover agentic AI failures—prompt injection and goal hijack, tool misuse, privilege abuse, memory poisoning, and cascading automation errors—before attackers and incidents do."

This shift from validating static inputs to validating dynamic behavior is crucial. The platform's capabilities, as noted in the OWASP Agentic AI Security Solutions Reference Guide, include agent scanning, penetration testing, and the sandboxed evaluation of tool calls and code execution. By simulating multi-agent scenarios and validating an agent's decisions against its intended goals, the system helps organizations build more trustworthy and resilient AI, ensuring that autonomous systems operate safely and as intended.

Industry Recognition and the Path Forward

The BIG Innovation Award, judged by a panel of experienced business executives, lends significant credibility to Adversa AI's approach, validating its focus on a pressing and complex market need. The external recognition from both the Business Intelligence Group and its reference in OWASP's guidance documents positions the company as a key player in the nascent but rapidly growing field of agentic AI security.

As enterprises move from experimenting with generative AI to deploying autonomous agents at scale, the demand for specialized security solutions is set to explode. While large technology companies provide the foundational platforms for building AI, a new ecosystem of specialized security vendors is emerging to protect these complex systems. The focus is no longer just on the AI model itself, but on the entire agentic system—its goals, tools, memory, and interactions.

For organizations looking to harness the power of autonomous AI, building in security from the ground up is not just a best practice but a necessity for long-term success and viability. The recognition of platforms like Adversa AI's marks a critical step in the industry's journey toward creating a secure and trustworthy autonomous future.