Qualys Expands TotalAI To Tackle Shadow AI, MCP Server Risks And AI Governance Gaps

Qualys has added new capabilities to its TotalAI product, extending the platform’s reach across shadow AI discovery, agentic AI governance, adversarial testing and audit-ready compliance evidence.

The updates, built on the Qualys Enterprise TruRisk Platform, are aimed at giving security teams a way to discover, test, monitor and govern enterprise AI risk from development through to production. The company says the capabilities are designed to help organisations meet emerging policy requirements around AI use in the US and EU, including obligations under the EU AI Act.

The Governance Problem

The release comes as enterprise AI adoption continues to outpace the controls built to govern it. Organisations are layering models, AI agents and Model Context Protocol servers onto security programs that were not designed for them, while attackers are using the same AI tools to move faster than defenders can respond.

Research Director at IDC, Grace Trinidad, observed: “AI is outrunning the controls built to govern it, and security teams can no longer treat that risk as a separate list to be scanned and closed.”

“The industry is moving beyond simply counting vulnerabilities toward continuously minimising the exploitable surface – what is actually reachable and can be made to do harm – and AI is turning that shift from good practice to a requirement. Organisations that fold AI risk into continuous exposure management, spanning discovery, assessment, runtime visibility and governance, will be the organisations positioned to adopt AI securely and at scale.”

Shadow AI And Agentic AI Discovery

TotalAI is designed to give security teams visibility into where AI is running across the enterprise. That includes shadow AI, cloud AI services, AI agents, models, MCP servers, AI containers and browser-based AI use.

For agentic AI, the platform can surface and control the tool calls AI agents make over MCP, allowing an agent’s reach to be contained if needed. Kernel-level instrumentation using eBPF reveals what AI workloads execute on servers, providing a layer of visibility that Qualys argues scanners and logs cannot match.

Shifting AI Security Left

TotalAI includes capabilities to catch AI vulnerabilities, misconfigurations and exposed secrets earlier in the development process – in code and pipelines rather than in production. Models can be tested for prompt injection, jailbreaks and unsafe output before they are deployed.

The platform goes beyond posture assessment to adversarial testing. TotalAI can red-team both large language models – testing for prompt injection and jailbreaks – and MCP servers, testing for tool poisoning, server-side request forgery and rug-pull attacks. The testing is mapped to the OWASP LLM and MCP Top 10 and the EU AI Act.

Qualys notes that while most tools govern MCP access, TotalAI scans the MCP server itself.

Proving Governance To Boards And Regulators

A central theme of the release is the shift from asking whether AI is secure to proving it. TotalAI provides security, engineering and governance, risk and compliance teams with audit-ready evidence of what AI exists across the organisation, the severity and impact of any issues and a TruRisk-based prioritisation plan for remediation.

President and CEO of Qualys, Sumedh Thakar, remarked: “With every modern enterprise leveraging AI, the question is changing from ‘Is my AI secure?’ to ‘Can I prove it to my board and regulators?'”

“TotalAI gives enterprises a single, unified way to assess, govern and secure AI risk continuously – not through periodic point-in-time assessments, but with real-time clarity and discipline.”

Availability

TotalAI is generally available now. Qualys will demonstrate the capabilities at Black Hat USA 2026 at booth #2,333. Further information and a demo request are available at qualys.com/free-trial-new/totalai.

Last Updated on July 31, 2026 by Nick Ross