A cross-industry coalition advancing an open reference architecture for securing and governing AI agents at enterprise scale
The governance gap in agentic AI
Gartner predicts that by 2028, an average global Fortune 500 enterprise will have over 150,000 agents in use, while only 13% of organizations think they have the right AI agent governance in place. Unlike traditional software, agents can reason, make multi-step plans, access data, call APIs, and take action across technology environments. This introduces a governance challenge that no single vendor or control point can solve alone. Securing AI agents requires connected capabilities across identity, data, applications, cloud infrastructure, networks, endpoints, and security operations.
That is why Proofpoint is proud to join the Blueprint Alliance as a founding member. The Blueprint Alliance is a cross-industry coalition advancing an open, multi-vendor reference architecture to secure and govern AI agents at enterprise scale. It helps organizations implement a zero-trust, agentic control plane so they can continue to scale their AI deployments.
AI agent security is an ecosystem challenge
AI agents work across the enterprise stack. They may act on behalf of users or business processes, access delegated permissions, interact with cloud infrastructure, retrieve sensitive data, connect to SaaS applications and APIs, or operate through endpoints and networks. They can also act asynchronously, potentially continuing work after the human who initiated a task has logged off.
This changes what customers need from their security and technology providers: an integrated approach that spans the full lifecycle of an agent, from discovery through containment. The reference architecture provides a common framework to help organizations answer four foundational questions:
1. Where are my agents?
2. What can they do?
3. What are they doing?
4. How do I respond?
What Proofpoint brings to the Alliance
At Proofpoint, we help customers protect their people and their most sensitive data from today's most advanced threats, including the targeted attacks, compromised accounts, and data loss risks that now extend into how employees and AI agents interact with information.
As a founding member of the Blueprint Alliance, we bring our expertise in runtime security, human risk context, data risk, and defense against prompt injection and malicious content across everyday enterprise surfaces — email, documents, collaboration tools, and the web. In practice, that means continuously verifying that an agent's actions match the intent behind them, and tracing the full path from a user's request through the agent's reasoning and tool use. We're applying that same approach to help customers build a more connected, governed foundation to agentic AI as we help advance the Blueprint Alliance architecture.
Moving from isolated controls to a connected architecture
The Blueprint Alliance aligned on principles for securing AI agents, including that every agent is a first-class identity; access is task-scoped rather than standing; delegation remains traceable; runtime behavior is continuously monitored; and containment is immediate and reversible.
The Alliance will also explore deeper interoperability by building and testing cross-vendor signal sharing across open standards, and by regularly publishing joint reference integrations.
For customers, this means a stronger foundation for adopting AI agents with confidence, combining the capabilities they need across their existing technology ecosystem rather than managing AI governance through disconnected point products.
Looking ahead
The agentic era is here, and secure adoption will require industry-wide collaboration. We look forward to participating in the Blueprint Alliance alongside its founding members, and to helping customers gain the visibility, governance, and coordinated response capabilities they need to scale AI agents responsibly.