Vanta acquires Pillar Security to secure autonomous AI agents

Bridging the AI governance gap

Vanta, a provider of security and compliance automation, has reached a definitive agreement to acquire Pillar Security. Pillar is a specialized company that focuses on runtime protection and adversarial testing for autonomous AI agents. This acquisition is designed to expand Vanta’s Trust Platform by linking high-level governance policies with actual security controls.

The move comes at a time when enterprise AI adoption is accelerating rapidly. Vanta's 2025 State of Trust Report found that 65% of surveyed IT and business leaders feel their adoption of agentic AI is moving faster than their understanding of the technology. Furthermore, only 48% of those respondents have established frameworks to limit the autonomy of these systems.

By combining these two companies, Vanta aims to help organizations manage the risks of agents that can access sensitive data and interact with business applications. Unlike standard AI that simply generates text, autonomous agents can execute tasks across connected systems without constant human supervision. This creates a need for infrastructure that can enforce rules continuously rather than just through periodic reviews.

How runtime protection works

Pillar Security provides technology that helps businesses discover and secure AI agents throughout their entire operational lifecycle. This includes identifying vulnerabilities and preventing unauthorized actions before they result in security incidents. The goal is to move security into the actual workflow of the AI rather than just evaluating risks after an activity has already occurred.

One of the core components of this integration is runtime monitoring. This allows security teams to identify suspicious activity or violations of established requirements as they happen. Vanta plans to use its Trust Graph to provide the necessary business context, which helps teams prioritize which alerts are the most critical to investigate.

The platform will also include adversarial testing capabilities. These tools allow organizations to simulate attack scenarios tailored to their specific business environments. By testing agents against these potential threats, security teams can find exploitable weaknesses and strengthen their defenses before a real attacker finds them.

A roadmap for 2027 integration

Vanta has outlined a specific timeline for rolling out these new capabilities throughout 2027. Starting in January, the company will launch an AI inventory feature. This tool will automatically identify and map AI applications, models, agents, and skills across an enterprise, associating them with owners and data permissions.

Following the inventory launch in January, Vanta will introduce the runtime monitoring and detection features. These tools are designed to flag suspicious behavior and ensure that autonomous systems follow the company's established security requirements. This provides a layer of oversight for agents that are performing tasks without a human in the loop.

By the summer of 2027, Vanta expects to launch runtime enforcement capabilities. These controls will translate high-level governance requirements into operational restrictions that can stop an AI agent from performing an unauthorized action in real time. This completes the cycle from identifying the AI asset to monitoring its behavior and finally enforcing safety boundaries.

Vanta's growth and market position

This acquisition is the third for Vanta, following its previous purchases of Riskey and Trustpage. The company is positioning itself as a broad platform for continuous security and risk management. Vanta has seen significant growth recently, surpassing 20,000 customers and reporting over $300 million in annual recurring revenue as of April 2026.

The demand for Vanta's AI governance offerings has been high, with early-access programs exceeding available capacity by a factor of six. The company also reported that daily usage of its own AI-powered automation, the Vanta Agent, increased 253% over the preceding three quarters. This suggests that customers are increasingly delegating security and compliance tasks to autonomous systems.

Vanta's customer base now includes three-quarters of the companies on the Forbes AI 50 list. Notable clients include Snowflake, GitHub, Ramp, and the Golden State Warriors. By integrating Pillar Security, Vanta aims to provide these large enterprises with the tools needed to maintain regulatory compliance while still benefiting from the speed of autonomous AI.