CrowdStrike Holdings Inc. today unveiled Falcon Guardian, software that finds the artificial intelligence agents running inside a company and shuts down the ones security teams have not approved.

The launch came at the company’s Fal.Con 2026 conference in Las Vegas. Guardian is the expanded successor to Falcon AI Detection and Response, which went generally available in December and picked up endpoint runtime protection and shadow AI discovery at the RSAC Conference in March.

Enforcement is what has been added this time. CrowdStrike’s argument is that the device is where an agent reasons, plans and runs code, which makes it the one place with a complete view of what that agent actually did.

Discovery comes first. The Falcon sensor inventories known and shadow agents across Windows and macOS machines, both running and dormant, and logs who deployed each one along with its security status. Guardian then ties agent behavior back to endpoint telemetry, building a chain that starts at a user’s prompt and runs through the identity used, the tools called and the skills invoked, down to whatever the agent did to the system afterward. Administrators can name which agents are permitted to run on a managed endpoint. Anything not on the list gets blocked.

Detection and response work off the same telemetry. Guardian flags attacks aimed at agents as well as agents misbehaving on their own, then reconstructs the execution chain and calculates blast radius while an incident is still in motion.

“CrowdStrike pioneered EDR by making the endpoint the control point for stopping attacks. AI demands the same approach,” said founder and Chief Executive George Kurtz (pictured). “AI hasn’t changed the attack, it has changed its speed. Governance alone can’t stop an agent already in motion.”

Two parts of Guardian are not shipping yet. AI Gateway will sit in front of enterprise AI traffic and apply Falcon policy to every call, including Model Context Protocol connections. CrowdStrike said it’s in pre-beta and will be generally available next quarter. The managed detection and response tier, Falcon Complete for Guardian, is due later this quarter. Managed threat hunting through Falcon Adversary OverWatch Cross-Domain runs today.

Agent telemetry lands in Falcon Next-Gen SIEM as first-party data with retention included, ready to be correlated against identity, cloud and software-as-a-service activity. Competing AI security tools ship no security information and event management of their own, according to CrowdStrike, leaving customers to bolt on a third-party product whose cost climbs as agent volume grows.

Guardian is the second major product CrowdStrike has released at this year’s conference. Falcon IQ, which hands the assessment and remediation work behind the company’s Project QuiltWorks coalition to a fleet of more than 50 agents, launched on the conference’s opening day Monday.

Photo: CrowdStrike/X