Secure Shadow AI at the Control Plane with Falcon for IT

CrowdStrike is introducing AI Discovery and Governance for CrowdStrike Falcon® for IT, a new capability that helps organizations identify, assess, and govern AI technologies across enterprise environments.

Enterprise IT infrastructure is the control plane for modern organizations. It determines how systems communicate, how identities authenticate, and how workloads execute across endpoints, servers, and clouds. This foundation supports the rapid implementation of AI across businesses. AI is introduced through the systems and identities that already govern enterprise operations, creating new opportunities for misuse through unintended behavior or adversary manipulation.

The challenge is that AI operations are often difficult to observe and govern with traditional security approaches. Organizations may not understand what their AI-enabled tools can access, how they make decisions, or how those actions could be leveraged. If attackers access AI infrastructure, they may inherit the ability to execute processes and access data as legitimate users.

AI Discovery and Governance for Falcon for IT gives teams visibility into AI tools, local model runtimes, software development kits (SDKs), agent frameworks, and external AI service integrations across endpoints. It helps organizations close the gap between rapid AI adoption and enterprise governance by enabling IT and security teams to discover AI use, understand associated risk, and take action from the CrowdStrike Falcon® platform.

Shadow AI Is Expanding the Enterprise Attack Surface 

As organizations integrate AI into workflows, new components including local model runtimes, SDKs, agent frameworks, and integrations with external AI services are introduced into the infrastructure supporting the rest of the environment — often without centralized tracking.

This is the emerging risk of shadow AI, which includes unsanctioned tools, locally deployed models, embedded AI capabilities, and agent-based workflows operating on endpoints. Many organizations lack a reliable inventory of where AI is running, which systems are using it, or which data and credentials it may be able to access.

New outbound connections, locally stored API keys and tokens, and model artifacts create additional exposure. These systems inherit existing permissions and operate within established trust boundaries, expanding the attack surface beyond what many organizations can see or govern. This is why discovery and control at the endpoint layer are essential.

Falcon for IT delivers broad visibility into the systems and activity that define enterprise infrastructure, including endpoints, applications, services, developer environments, and AI-enabled technologies. Security teams can use it to identify exposed systems, audit identity and privilege exposure, monitor for suspicious activity, and investigate how risk accumulates across the environment.

Falcon for IT enables teams to take direct action at the endpoint and infrastructure layer. They can use it to remove unauthorized software, enforce configurations, remediate system issues, and contain endpoints. Falcon for IT can also be used to uninstall legacy tools, fix misconfigurations, or restart critical services, helping teams respond to issues without leaving the Falcon platform.

Closing the AI Governance Gap with Falcon for IT

Many components powering enterprise AI operate outside centralized visibility and introduce new connections and credentials into the environment. This creates a gap between what exists and what is governed.

AI Discovery and Governance for Falcon for IT helps close this gap at the endpoint layer as part of a broader secure AI approach. It provides broad visibility into AI technologies across endpoints, including tools, models, SDKs, agent frameworks, and integrations with external services, even when they exist only at runtime or within developer environments.

Beyond discovery, AI Discovery and Governance enables governance and action. Organizations can identify unauthorized AI tools, enforce policy, remove or restrict their use, and audit how these technologies are configured and connected. This allows teams to manage AI adoption without losing control of the underlying infrastructure.

AI technologies are inherently polymorphic. The same capability can appear under different names, be installed through multiple vectors, or be replaced by functionally equivalent alternatives. Governing individual tools is no longer sufficient. Control must extend to the capabilities they introduce.

Falcon for IT addresses this by mapping AI technologies to their underlying capabilities, enabling organizations to enforce policy at the functional level rather than chasing individual tools. It also extends visibility into the data and credentials these systems depend on, including API keys, tokens, repositories, and other sensitive assets that can become part of the attack surface.

Together, these capabilities allow organizations to move from awareness to action. With AI Discovery and Governance for Falcon for IT, they can understand what AI technologies exist, how they operate, what risks they introduce, and how to reduce exposure across enterprise infrastructure and AI-enabled systems.

AI Expands the Control Plane, Control Determines the Outcome

AI is introducing new models, agent workflows, integrations, and automated decision-making systems across existing infrastructure and trust boundaries. Organizations increasingly rely on this control plane to operate, automate, and scale enterprise and AI-driven workflows.

In critical infrastructure, where these systems support real-world operations, the consequences of compromise are immediate and far-reaching. Securing this environment requires visibility into what exists, understanding how systems are connected, and the ability to act when risk is identified.

With AI Discovery and Governance for Falcon for IT, CrowdStrike helps organizations secure Shadow AI at the control plane by discovering AI technologies across endpoints, assessing how they introduce risk, and enabling teams to govern AI adoption from the Falcon platform.

See Falcon for IT AI Discovery and Governance in action in this demo:

Additional Resources

• Learn more by visiting the Falcon for IT product page.
• Explore how CrowdStrike solutions secure AI.
• Join us at Fal.Con 2026 as we bring together cyber leaders from across the industry to help secure the AI revolution.