The release of a new KuppingerCole Leadership Compass is always a significant event for the cybersecurity industry, offering a vendor-neutral view of the market’s current state. The 2025 edition, focusing on API Security and Management, is critical as it arrives at a pivotal moment for technology. It clearly presents a fact many organizations are just beginning to understand: the crucial connection between the rise of Artificial Intelligence and the necessity for robust API security.
This is the first part of a three-installment blog series highlighting the main findings of this landmark report. In this post, we will emphasize its core theme: the interconnected and vulnerable relationship between AI and APIs.
In the new KuppingerCole report, analyst Alexei Balaganski explains that APIs have evolved far beyond simple technical tools; they now orchestrate business logic and drive automation across the entire enterprise. The rise of artificial intelligence has supercharged this trend. The analysts present a key finding that establishes the modern relationship between these technologies: “APIs are the backbone of Al: Every LLM integration, agentic Al workflow, or autonomous decision system depends on API calls”. This fundamental shift means that APIs no longer just support business operations—they now actively define them.
This deep, API-driven integration introduces a significant and high-stakes attack surface. The report issues a stark warning about this new reality, explaining that any effort to secure an AI model itself is ultimately ineffective if its underlying connections are vulnerable. As the analyst puts it, protecting a model “is futile if the APIs that interface with those models are left unguarded”. This vulnerability exposes organizations to a new class of AI-related threats, including prompt injection and data exfiltration, which are often executed through sophisticated business logic attacks that exploit an API’s intended functionality to bypass traditional defenses.
This challenge is precisely what Salt Security was created to address. Our platform aims to look beyond common vulnerabilities and understand the specific logic and context of each API. KuppingerCole highlights our “patented AI/ML engine”, which it says “differentiates between benign anomalies
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