‘There is a significant services revenue stream about to be unleashed for channel partners that understand the dynamics that AI is bringing,’ Aviatrix CEO Doug Merritt tells CRN.
Cloud networking and security specialist Aviatrix has launched a new platform aimed at addressing the surge of cyberattacks and the growing risks posed by compromised advanced AI tools, such as Claude Mythos, according to Aviatrix CEO Doug Merritt.
Launched on Wednesday, the new containment platform, Aviatrix AgentGuard, is a first of its kind that takes a different approach to agentic AI security, Merritt (pictured) told CRN.
Rather than focusing on detection and remediation, it’s about shrinking the blast radius associated with compromised AI agents, he said.
“What I’ve been watching happen progressively over the past few years is that AI is a new accelerant. Mean time to detection and mean time to resolution, [is] still important, but to create cyber resiliency, the core metric needs to be blast radius,” he said. “If you have a broad blast radius, then the breach becomes very troublesome to catastrophic.”
For the vast majority of enterprises, there is no architectural constraint on where a compromised workload can go. For most AI agents that are compromised, the “blast radius” can include all enterprise applications and even the entire network, Merritt said.
Aviatrix AgentGuard works by discovering every agent running across VMs, Kubernetes clusters, and serverless functions, both authorized and shadow, and maps the LLMs, tools, and data each agent connects to, while building a continuous risk profile. AgentGuard then extends the Aviatrix Cloud Native Security Fabric to enforce Communication Governance at the agent workload, governing what each agent can reach and what can reach it. The most common exfiltration vectors are blocked by default, according to Aviatrix.
The launch of the platform includes Zero Trust for AI Workloads, a feature introduced in November and is now generally available, according to the company.
Aviatrix AgentGuard is now in early access.
For channel partners, the platform opens the door for add-on diagnostic and assessment services, focusing on blast radius assessments and agent governance, Merritt said.
“I believe deeply, as one of the fathers of the detect and remediate era, that we’re entering a containment era and that products like ours that can be deployed within these environments. But there’s also a significant services opportunity,” he said.
Many enterprise IT teams still need help mapping their environment and understanding their full attack surface, including where their perimeters and egress points are, how to design stronger containment, and how to run that effectively day to day, Merritt said.
“There is a significant services revenue stream about to be unleashed for channel partners that understand the dynamics that AI is bringing, and what that means for vulnerability detection or remediation, and why containment is likely to be a higher growth area over the next 1-2-3 years within these organizations,” he said.
Santa Clara, Calif.-based Aviatrix, under the direction of Merritt, released a revamped partner program in 2025. The company has a goal of driving 100 percent of its transactions through the channel, Merritt told CRN last year.
