“We have this opportunity to be a trust layer, not just for … network activity, but actually what’s happening at the application layer, at the workload layer, between agents, between workloads, between data,” Peter Bailey, senior vice president and general manager of Cisco’s security business, told Network World last month. “Cisco has long offered that trust layer, having trust anchors and trust boundaries and other technologies, so we’re really extending that into the world of agents and workloads.”
For its part, Galileo recently said it would contribute its Agent Control framework to the open-source community. Agent Control is a control plane that establishes a new standard for governing agent behavior. It was released under the Apache 2.0 license.
The democratization of AI brings new complexities, Hathi stated. “The behavior of agentic applications can lead to unexpected, inaccurate, low quality, or harmful outputs. These issues can ultimately lead to decreased customer trust, poor end-user experiences, and increased costs,” he wrote. “As a result, teams need visibility across the AI stack beyond signals like latency and errors. Observability must evaluate issues like hallucinations and bias, security metrics to detect, mitigate business risks, and track cost and usage metrics to ensure clear ROI.”
“Galileo will help us do just this, expanding Cisco’s deep bench of AI engineering talent to set the standard for AI agent evaluation,” Hathi wrote.
The acquisition is expected to close in the fourth quarter of Cisco’s 2026 fiscal year.
