Cisco is snapping up WideField Security to plug a hole in its agentic AI defense. The Sunnyvale startup, fresh off an $11.3 million Series A led by Crosspoint Capital (with Cisco Investments participating), specializes in tying together identity, session and activity data for humans and AI agents in real time. Cisco plans to fold that tech into its Splunk SOC, letting security teams correlate telemetry from endpoints, networks and cloud systems in a format optimized for AI-driven workflows. Jeetu Patel, Cisco’s president and chief product officer, already sits on WideField’s board. This move follows two other AI-security buys in recent months: Astrix Security for agent protection and Galileo Technologies to beef up Splunk Observability. Kamal Hathi, SVP in charge of the Splunk business, says the explosion of AI agents and automated workloads at machine speed has created security risks that legacy tools can’t spot—like approved AI processes going rogue. WideField’s pipelines will feed session-level signals into Cisco’s Data Fabric, enabling Splunk’s agentic SOC to flag suspicious behavior even from authenticated users or services. A partner exec at Long View Systems, Lane Irvine, adds that deep identity tracking—beyond simple login checks—will be critical as AI agents proliferate. Customers aren’t demanding it en masse yet, he notes, but they’re gearing up.