Cambridge, UK, Aug. 03, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Darktrace, a global leader in behavioral security, today introduced the Darktrace Behavioral Defense Platform™, which is designed to protect the modern enterprise as AI systems and agents increasingly operate alongside people and connect to business-critical applications and infrastructure.
The platform builds on more than a decade of Darktrace innovation in behavioral security to address a new reality where risk can emerge from people, AI agents, trusted identities, connected systems, or the interactions between them.
The Darktrace Behavioral Defense Platform uses Darktrace’s unique Adaptive AI™ to meet that challenge. It continuously learns how an organization’s people and AI behave, building a unique understanding of the organization so it can detect and respond autonomously when behavior deviates. This business-specific understanding enables the platform to identify activity that does not belong, connect it with related behavior across the enterprise, and act autonomously in real time before risk escalates.
An essential part of the new platform is Darktrace / SECURE AI™, a product that secures the deployment, management, development, and use of AI systems and agents, alongside a new Platform Portal that brings 360° Insights into a single customer environment. The portal provides a correlated, real-time view of insights and threats across the digital estate, helping customers understand how activity and risk connect across AI, people, and infrastructure.
AI Is Changing What Organizations Can Do and What It Takes to Secure Them
The need for this connected approach is growing quickly. Across Darktrace’s customer base, the average number of connections to AI services increased 13% during the first half of 2026, and the typical organization now interacts with seven different AI providers[1]. This expands the number of users, identities, agents, and systems that security teams must understand and protect, while exposing the limits of fixed guardrails and controls. In June 2026, NIST highlighted mathematical proof showing that no fixed set of AI guardrails can be universally robust against adversarial prompts, reinforcing the need for continuous monitoring, testing, and updates[2].
At the same time, the external threats facing organizations are changing rapidly. Darktrace’s mid-year threat update found that attackers are increasingly abusing trusted identities, SaaS platforms, software supply chains, and AI services rather than relying on software vulnerabilities alone.
The risk does not always begin with malicious intent either. In a recent incident, OpenAI models escaped their test environment and breached a Hugging Face system.
Static rules, signatures, and known indicators of compromise cannot keep pace with compromises and attacks that operate inside authenticated, trusted channels. Security teams need to understand activity in context, including who or what is acting, what systems it is accessing, and whether its behavior is consistent with how the organization normally operates.
“AI is creating extraordinary opportunities for organizations, but it is also reshaping the security challenges they face,” said Ed Jennings, President and CEO of Darktrace. “For more than a decade, we have built on the single conviction that security starts with understanding behavior. As people, agents, and infrastructure connect in new ways, organizations need security that understands how they operate as a whole. The Darktrace Behavioral Defense Platform is built to help organizations move forward in this environment with confidence."
Introducing the Darktrace Behavioral Defense Platform
The Darktrace Behavioral Defense Platform is built for a threat environment in which risk can come from a rogue or misconfigured AI agent, an attacker exploiting a new vulnerability, or a bad actor operating through trusted channels. Rather than relying solely on static rules, signatures, or known indicators, the platform learns what is normal for each organization and builds a real-time understanding of behavior across the enterprise. It provides unified visibility, continuous behavioral monitoring, and autonomous response across AI, people, and infrastructure, helping security teams detect activity that does not belong and contain it before it causes harm. This includes securing the deployment, management, and development of AI systems and agents; defending against phishing, account takeover, data exfiltration, and human risk across email and collaboration tools; and delivering visibility, detection, and response across network, cloud, and OT environments.
The Darktrace Behavioral Defense Platform is built on three core capabilities that work together to turn behavioral understanding into protection:
- 360° Insights, the visibility layer, provides a correlated, real-time view of insights and threats across the full digital estate.
- Unique Behavioral Profile, the intelligence layer, is an evolving representation of how an organization behaves, connects, and operates across AI, people, and infrastructure — unique to every environment, continuously learning in real time and more accurate with every interaction.
- Real-Time AI Analyst™, the autonomous layer, detects, investigates, triages, and responds in real time, so threats are contained before they escalate.
Together, these capabilities enable Darktrace to detect known, unknown, and novel threats; understand attacks that cross environments as a single incident rather than many disconnected alerts; and enable autonomous response at machine speed, without waiting on a human when immediate action is required.
The new Platform Portal serves as the central entry point to a customer’s Darktrace deployment. It provides a unified view of the products, technologies, environments, coverage, and risks across the platform, helping teams understand their current security posture, navigate across capabilities, prioritize areas requiring attention, and see how their Darktrace estate expands as they adopt more of the platform.
Adaptive AI: The Technology Foundation
At the core of the platform is Adaptive AI, Darktrace’s proprietary technology foundation. Adaptive AI applies the most effective AI techniques for each security challenge, from anomaly detection and probabilistic reasoning to graph analysis and large language models, to interpret complex activity across the enterprise. As it operates, it builds an evolving model of how each organization behaves, learning the relationships, dependencies, and operational patterns that make it unique. The result is a unique behavioral profile that is specific to every environment, learns continuously in real time, and becomes more accurate with every interaction. These capabilities are strengthened by Darktrace’s proprietary security dataset, built from millions of Real-Time AI Analyst investigations and observations. When behavior deviates from normal, Adaptive AI enables the platform to detect, triage, and respond autonomously in real time.
Today, the Darktrace Behavioral Defense Platform and Adaptive AI protects nearly 10,000 organizations across all industries around the world, including Aer Soleir, Alterman, Banco Galicia, Coca-Cola Beverages Northeast, HARMAN International, State of Oklahoma and more.
REFERENCES
[1] Based on aggregated Darktrace product telemetry across a fleet of ~8,800 observed deployments, measuring average detected connections to external AI services per deployment per month from January 2026 to June 2026.
[2] NIST, "NIST Mathematical Proof Supports Transition to a Continuous-Monitor-and-Update Security Model for AI Systems," June 9, 2026, https://www.nist.gov/news-events/news/2026/06/nist-mathematical-proof-supports-transition-continuous-monitor-and-update.
About Darktrace
Darktrace secures the modern enterprise by protecting AI, people, and infrastructure with behavioral security. Founded in 2013, Darktrace uses Adaptive AI to understand what is normal for an organization and detect known, unknown and novel threats and respond autonomously in real time. The Darktrace Behavioral Defense Platform delivers unified visibility, continuous behavioral monitoring, and autonomous response across the enterprise. Darktrace protects nearly 10,000 customers across major industries globally, helping organizations defend AI-powered threats across AI and agents, email and collaboration tools, and hybrid networks, while enabling them to innovate with AI securely.
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