Cyber Defense Magazine has named Polygraf AI a Top InfoSec Innovator for 2026, in the Groundbreaking AI Usage Control for Security and Compliance category. The award was announced at CyberDefenseCon 2026 in Orlando.
What the award recognizes
The award reflects a bet we made early: that AI adoption in regulated industries would stall on control, not on model quality.
That has held up. The blocker in banking, healthcare and government is rarely whether the model is good enough. It is that nobody can say what the model was given, what it sent back, or whether the organization’s own policy was applied on the way through. A policy written into a system prompt is a request. Enterprises need to prove what their agents actually did, not just instruct them well.
The AI Behavioral Control Plane exists for that gap.
How it works
The AI Behavioral Control Plane sits inline between people and AI tools, and enforces organizational policy before data leaves.
It inspects prompts, retrieved content, tool calls and responses as they pass, applies the policy, and blocks, redacts or passes each request with a record of the decision. It runs on-premises on CPU only, adds under 100 ms of latency, and sends no data outside the customer’s environment.
That last constraint is what makes it usable in the industries that need it most. A control layer that ships prompts to a vendor to be scored is not an option for a bank or a hospital.
About Polygrafi AI
Headquartered in Austin, Texas, Polygraf AI created the AI Behavioral Control Plane (AiBC) – a category of AI security that makes AI behavior observable, explainable and controllable in real time. Polygraf’s proprietary, premise-agnostic Small Language Model
(SLM) technology helps critical-operations teams detect and mitigate AI risks using local, explainable and auditable AI.
Learn more at https://polygraf.ai.
About Cyber Defense Awards
This is Cyber Defense Magazine’s 14th year of honoring cybersecurity innovators, in this case the Top InfoSec Innovators for 2026, on our Cyber Defense Awards platform. In this competition, judges for these and other prestigious awards includes cybersecurity industry veterans, trailblazers and market makers Ron Gula of Gula Tech Adventures, Gary Miliefsky of CDMG, Dr. Lindsey Polley de Lopez of VentureScope, Katie Gray of In-Q-Tel, Robert R. Ackerman Jr. of DataTribe, Ira Winkler from CruiseCon, Dino Boukouris of AltitudeCyber and with much appreciation to emeritus judges Robert Herjavec of Cyderes, Dr. Peter Stephenson of CDMG and David DeWalt of NightDragon. Top InfoSec Innovators for 2026 is found here, and download The Black Unicorn Report for 2026 and Top Global CISOs Winners for 2026.
About Cyber Defense Magazine
Cyber Defense Magazine was founded in 2012 by Gary S. Miliefsky, globally recognized cyber security thought leader, inventor and entrepreneur and continues to be the premier source of IT Security information. We are managed and published by and for ethical, honest, passionate information security professionals. Our mission is to share cutting-edge knowledge, real-world stories and awards on the best ideas, products and services in the information technology industry. We deliver electronic magazines every month online for free, and limited special editions exclusively for the RSAC, BlackHat and Cyber Defense Conferences. Learn more about us at cyberdefensemagazine.com. Cyber Defense Magazine is a proud member of the Cyber Defense Media Group.
Data Privacy 
Data Provenance 
Content Generation