212 AI developers voted in a category with a recognized front-runner but no dominant monopolist. Here is what the results reveal about AI security.
The March 2026 IT Brand Pulse AI Brand Leader survey asked 212 members of the AI developer community to vote for Market Leader and Intelligence & Innovation Leader in AI Security Platforms, one of 26 products in the AI Engineering stack. Protect AI took the top position in both categories, receiving 25.9% of votes for Market Leader and widening its lead to 27.8% for Intelligence & Innovation Leader. The top two vendors were clearly separated from the rest of the field, though the spreads remain narrow enough to reflect an active competitive tier.
These results point to a category with a recognized front-runner, but not a runaway monopolist. The top two vendors are clearly separated from the rest, yet the spreads are still narrow enough to show an active competitive tier rather than total dominance. The IT Brand Pulse analyst team expects AI security to become a mandatory layer in production AI as threats evolve and enterprise adoption scales.
What Are AI Security Platforms?
IT Brand Pulse defines AI Security Platforms as products designed to protect AI systems, models, prompts, data flows, and runtime behaviors from AI-specific threats. These platforms address risks such as prompt injection, jailbreaks, model vulnerabilities, unsafe open-source model imports, data leakage, agent misuse, and insecure integrations, while increasingly extending across model scanning, red teaming, runtime defense, and policy enforcement for enterprise AI applications. AI Security Platforms sits within the AI Trust sub-layer of the broader AI Engineering stack, alongside AI Guardrails Platforms and AI Governance Platforms.
Download the Brand Leader Report for AI Security Platforms.
