Wallarm Leads Development of New A2AS Standard for Agentic AI Security

SAN FRANCISCO, Sept. 29, 2025 /PRNewswire/ -- Wallarm today announced its role in the publication of "A2AS: Agentic AI Runtime Security and Self-Defense," a groundbreaking research project led by Eugene Neelou (OWASP, Wallarm) together with researchers from AWS, Bytedance, Cisco, Elastic, Google, JPMorganChase, Meta, and Salesforce.

The A2AS framework introduces a new security layer for AI agents, LLM-powered applications, and AI protocols, similar to how HTTPS secures HTTP.

The A2AS framework is built on three breakthrough capabilities that fundamentally address agentic AI security risks such as prompt injection, tool misuse, and agent compromise:

• Behavior Certificates: The industry's first mechanism for declaring and enforcing AI agent actions and permissions. Like HTTPS certificates secured the web, behavior certificates can secure agentic AI interactions with users, tools, and other agents.
• Model Self-Defense Reasoning: Embeds security awareness directly into the AI model's context window, guiding it to recognize and reject malicious or untrusted instructions in real time without any external components or guardrails.
• Prompt-Level Security Controls: Provides authenticated prompts, security boundaries, and policy-as-code so that every request and interaction is verified, sandboxed, and aligned with enterprise security policies.

As enterprises rapidly deploy agentic AI into workflows across finance, healthcare, and infrastructure, the security risks scale from individual task failures to enterprise-wide compromise. Traditional guardrails and post-processing methods have proven to be too slow, too complex, and too costly. A2AS offers a practical, lightweight, and scalable approach that protects AI agents at runtime without adding latency or operational complexity.

Eugene Neelou, an industry pioneer and Head of AI Security at Wallarm, serves as the lead for the A2AS project. Neelou previously coined the term MLSecOps, co-founded the world's first AI red teaming startup, and co-authored the OWASP Top 10 for LLM Security. He is joined by Ivan Novikov, Founder and CEO of Wallarm, who contributed his expertise in API and AI security.

"AI agents are already in production, and they introduce a dangerous new attack surface," said Ivan Novikov. "With A2AS, we've shown that security can be embedded directly into the agent runtime, turning self-defense from a theory into a practical defense layer."

"AI agents are rapidly infiltrating enterprise software, requiring privileged access and deep integration with company-wide tools," added Eugene Neelou. "Under pressure to adopt AI, enterprises are voluntarily incorporating vulnerable-by-design AI capabilities. Without deliberate security hardening, disaster is inevitable."

The A2AS paper is the first in a series of publications aimed at establishing A2AS as the industry standard for AI runtime security. Researchers, engineers, and enterprises interested in design partnerships or early adoption are invited to read the paper, learn more, and get involved at https://a2as.org. Contact the project team to explore collaboration opportunities and shape the future of secure AI.

Disclaimer:

The companies noted above are acknowledged for their employees' contributions to this white paper. The inclusion of these companies does not constitute or imply their endorsement of the white paper or its contents. All company names and trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

About Wallarm
Wallarm is the only unified platform for API and agentic AI security successfully deployed in enterprise production environments. With Wallarm, customers receive the fastest, easiest, and most effective way to stop API attacks. Organizations choose Wallarm to protect their APIs and AI agents because the platform delivers a complete inventory of APIs, real-time blocking, and patented AI/ML-based abuse detection. Wallarm is headquartered in San Francisco, California, and is backed by Toba Capital, Y Сombinator, Partech, and other investors.

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SOURCE Wallarm