Securing the Agentic Age: CSA Launches AI Resilience Center of Excellence

LAS VEGAS, NV – August 03, 2026 – The rapid integration of artificial intelligence into the enterprise has moved from a competitive advantage to an operational necessity. But as autonomous AI agents begin to permeate corporate workflows, a new and complex category of risk is emerging. Addressing this head-on, the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) today announced the launch of the AI Resilience Center of Excellence, a major initiative designed to arm organizations against the coming wave of AI-driven failures.

Operating under the CSAI Foundation, the organization’s non-profit arm dedicated to AI safety, the Center is a vendor-neutral, community-driven effort to establish a new operational discipline. It aims to provide the frameworks and best practices necessary to protect, monitor, contain, and recover data and systems in an era increasingly defined by autonomous AI. Cementing the initiative’s industry significance, Rubrik, the Security and AI Operations Company, has joined as the Lead Founding Partner, bringing its deep expertise in threat research and data security to the forefront.

The New Imperative: Surviving AI-Driven Failures

The promise of AI-driven efficiency is shadowed by a landscape of novel vulnerabilities. According to recent research from Rubrik Zero Labs, 86% of IT and security leaders expect AI agents to outpace their organization's security guardrails within the next year. This gap between innovation and security is precisely what the AI Resilience Center aims to close. The challenge lies in the nature of AI-driven failures, which extend far beyond traditional software bugs or network breaches.

These failures fall into two broad categories. The first is adversarial, where threat actors actively target AI systems. This includes sophisticated techniques like data poisoning, where malicious data is injected into training sets to corrupt a model’s behavior, and prompt injection, which overrides an LLM's safeguards to cause unsafe outputs or data leakage. Rubrik's research has already identified novel threats in this space, such as "Remote Prompt Execution," which will be unveiled at Black Hat 2026.

The second category is systemic. The non-deterministic nature of AI means a system can be fully operational but still "quietly wrong," with autonomous agents acting on flawed assumptions or models drifting from their intended purpose. These failures can go undetected for long periods, silently corrupting data, compromising decisions, and eroding trust. "As organizations accelerate their adoption of AI and autonomous systems, they're also entering an era where AI-driven failures will become increasingly common, due to both sophisticated threat actors and the complexity of deploying AI at enterprise scale," said Jim Reavis, CEO and co-founder of the Cloud Security Alliance. "Helping organizations solve these issues is why we founded the AI Resilience Center of Excellence."

Building a Framework for Trust and Recovery

The Center’s mission is to transform AI resilience from a theoretical concept into a practical, operational discipline. By creating a vendor-neutral hub, the CSA intends to pool industry expertise to develop tangible resources that organizations can immediately apply. The initial roadmap is ambitious and focused on delivering practical value.

Key initiatives include the development of an AI Resilience Reference Architecture, which will serve as a shared model for designing recoverable AI environments. This will be complemented by a series of board and executive briefings designed to frame AI resilience as a critical governance issue. To help teams prepare for the worst, the Center will also create tabletop exercise kits simulating scenarios like data corruption, agentic runaway, and recovery failures.

For practitioners on the front lines, a guidance series will offer maturity models and metrics to benchmark and improve resilience posture. This comprehensive approach recognizes that AI resilience is not simply a rebranding of existing business continuity plans. It requires new methods of observability focused on monitoring data, models, outputs, and agentic actions, as well as verifying data provenance to detect tampering and drift. The initiative builds on CSA's existing work, including its AI Controls Matrix (AICM) and STAR for AI framework, which aim to make responsible AI principles measurable and auditable.

Rubrik's Strategic Play in the AI Security Arena

Rubrik's role as the Lead Founding Partner signifies a major strategic investment in shaping the future of AI security. The company's contributions are set to provide the Center's research with a critical foundation in real-world threat intelligence and operational data. This partnership moves beyond simple financial backing, positioning Rubrik as a central thought leader in the nascent field of AI resilience.

The company will contribute through three primary channels. First, its independent threat research unit, Rubrik Zero Labs, will supply data-driven intelligence on emerging AI threats. Second, aggregated and anonymized product telemetry from its security platforms will offer insights into how AI-driven incidents unfold and what is required for successful recovery. Finally, its executive leadership will help guide the Center's strategic direction.

"AI agents are already inside the enterprise, and most security teams can't tell you what those agents do," noted Kavitha Mariappan, Chief Transformation Officer at Rubrik. "The AI Resilience Center of Excellence gives us a vendor-neutral hub for developing observability frameworks supported by independent research and aggregated customer data. Addressing AI resilience systematically now will help organizations recover more quickly and efficiently in the future."

Beyond the Enterprise: A Push for Societal Stability

The implications of AI failure extend far beyond corporate balance sheets. As these technologies become deeply embedded in critical infrastructure—from power grids and transportation to healthcare and public services—the need for resilience becomes a matter of societal stability. The Center’s mission explicitly includes public sector organizations, acknowledging the broader scope of the challenge.

This sentiment was echoed by Jen Easterly, CEO of RSAC, who commented on the initiative's importance. “As AI becomes embedded across critical infrastructure and public services, societies must also build the capacity to withstand disruption and adapt safely to transformational change,” she said. “RSAC is proud to sponsor the AI Resilience Center of Excellence and support a community-driven effort to make resilience a practical discipline for the AI era.”

To foster these crucial conversations, the CSA will host its CxO Trust Summit on August 19, a virtual event bringing together CISOs, board members, and regulators to address AI governance and evolving regulatory requirements. The Center is actively inviting organizations and senior leaders to contribute to its work by joining its Executive Advisory Committee, reinforcing its commitment to a collaborative, industry-wide approach to securing the autonomous future.