Black Hat State of Security Vendors

Andy Ellis's roundup of Black Hat 2026 security vendors finds the industry has entered an AI world, with nearly half of booths not directly mentioning AI or agents in their taglines yet AI effects pervasive across Identity, SaaS, AppSec, and Data spaces. The market splits into three categories: tools that assess problems, tools that stop adversaries, and tools that prevent issues, with assessment tools frustratingly plentiful.

Andy Ellis has a roundup https://www.duha.co/reports/state-of-security-vendors-blackhat-2026/ of the security vendors at Black Hat this year. Key Takeaways: We have entered into an AI world. While nearly half of booths didn’t directly mention AI or agents in their taglines, the effects of AI are everywhere. Multiple spaces Identity, SaaS, AppSec, Data have almost every vendor leading with AI; existing unsolved problem areas just got worse. At the same time, there’s a clear trichotomy in the market: tools that tell you how bad things are; tools that stop adversaries, and tools that prevent problems from occurring. While you’d suspect that the tools that fix things would dominate, the tools that merely tell you how bad things are seem to be frustratingly plentiful...