Lasso Named in Gartner's Market Overview for AI Usage Control

Gartner published its Market Overview for AI Usage Control on August 20, 2026, and Lasso is named among the vendors defining this emerging category, alongside companies like Microsoft, Cisco, Zscaler, Palo Alto Networks, and Check Point.

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The report defines AI usage control (AIUC) as the tooling that governs how employees interact with third-party AI applications, including discovery and inventory of the GenAI tools already in use, risk assessment of those tools, policy enforcement, and runtime protection against misuse. Gartner draws a clear line between this and securing the AI applications a company builds itself. AIUC is about what happens when employees bring ChatGPT, Copilot, Cowork, and similar tools into daily work, often before security teams know those tools are there.

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That framing lines up with what we see with our customers, and Gartner's own numbers back it up. Through 2027, at least 70% of unauthorized AI activity will come from employees working around policy rather than from external attackers. The bigger near-term risk isn't a malicious actor but a well-intentioned employee finding faster ways to get work done.

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The report also explains why existing tools fall short here. Agentic AI expands what security teams have to watch, such as local agents that pull from external repositories, chain tool calls, and use MCPs to talk to other agents. This introduces supply chain exposures that a browser extension or a web proxy alone won't catch. As Gartner puts it, "AI applications, especially agentic AI, create a significant new workspace attack surface."

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Gartner counts more than 50 vendors in this space, 80% of them early-stage startups, with established players acquiring their way in. One trend in the report stood out to us: Gartner describes AI security platform providers consolidating usage control and AI application security into a single offering rather than shipping usage control as its own point product. That's the model we built Lasso around from the start, with discovery, AI risk management, automated red teaming, and runtime protection running as one continuous loop instead of four disconnected tools.

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Being named in this report is a signal that AIUC is moving from a nice-to-have to a budget line, with Gartner projecting more than half of enterprises will run dedicated AI usage control technology by 2030. We'll keep building toward the continuous-loop model rather than a narrower point solution, because that's where the market is already headed.

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Source: Gartner, "Market Overview for AI Usage Control," Ashish Suraj Bhan, Peter Firstbrook, John Watts, 20 August 2026.