Snyk Named a Leader in The Forrester Wave™: Agentic Development Security Tools, Q4 2026

We're proud to share that Snyk has been named a Leader in The Forrester Wave™: Agentic Development Security Tools, Q4 2026. Snyk received the highest score in the Strategy category, along with the highest scores possible in these criteria:

• Strategy: Vision, Roadmap, and Partner Ecosystem

• Current offering: AI dynamic testing, AI coding guardrails, autonomous proprietary code remediation, and developer experience

Software development changed who does the work

For two decades, software development moved at a human pace where developers wrote code, peers reviewed it, and security teams tested it on a schedule. AI coding assistants compressed that cycle, and coding agents are now changing who does the work. Forrester frames the shift: "AI coding agents are changing how software is built, moving from developer assistants to active participants in development workflows."

Adoption has moved well past the pilot stage. In the Stack Overflow 2026 Developer Survey, 66% of developers who use AI work in coding agents, and 73% of those using AI coding assistants or agents use them daily. As a result, the developer's role is shifting from writing every line to orchestrating the agents that write it.

Each of those agents brings its own supply chain; it installs packages, connects to MCP servers, loads skills, and invokes tools the security team may never have reviewed. Because it can also run commands, edit files, and access sensitive data, its actions need to be governed as much as its code needs to be tested. In our view, security models built to scan code after it is written were not designed to govern the systems creating it.

Attackers are moving at machine speed too

In 2025, Anthropic's threat intelligence team disrupted an espionage campaign in which AI carried out an estimated 80 to 90% of tactical operations, with humans in a supervisory role. The CrowdStrike 2026 Global Threat Report puts average eCrime breakout time, from initial access to lateral movement, at 29 minutes, with the fastest observed case at 27 seconds.

Those timelines change how teams should think about their vulnerability backlog. Pull request queues, ticket triage, and quarterly pentests were designed around attackers who moved slower than the fix. Most backlogs consist of low- and medium-severity findings, deprioritized one at a time. AI makes it cheap to chain several of those minor issues into a critical exploit path, so the backlog now functions as an attack surface rather than deferred cleanup.

The pressure is also building inside the codebase; Snyk’s product data shows new critical and high-severity issues detected grew 10x in the past year, and roughly eight new issues are introduced for every one remediated. When risk is created faster than it is fixed, the answer is a different operating model: security agents that fix continuously, guardrails inside the agent workflow, and adversarial testing that proves controls hold

AI applications are reaching production faster than governance

Teams are shipping AI applications and agents into production faster than governance processes can keep pace with. Many security leaders are still working to answer basic questions about their AI estate:

• Which models, agents, and MCP servers are running, and what data can they reach?

• Which skills were pulled from public registries, and who approved them?

• Could you audit what a given agent did last week?

This is shadow AI at enterprise scale. Its risks, such as prompt injection, excessive agency, and data leakage, are behavioral: they live in an agent’s decisions as well as its code, which is why code scanning alone can’t surface them. Model choice is part of that risk. In Snyk’s 2026 State of Agentic AI Adoption, Volume III, the lowest-capability models averaged 501 on decision override, a 0 to 1,000 score, while the most capable models averaged 45, a gap of more than 10x. Roughly a third of the scored model references in US environments fall in that lowest group. Governing them starts with a live inventory of the AI estate, including which models are in play, and policies that apply before an agent acts.

Why this evaluation matters

In our view, Forrester's evaluation reflects these shifts in operating model, and it assessed agentic development security across the full span of AI-driven development: the code agents produce, the agents and the components they pull in, and the AI applications teams build. Forrester asks buyers to weigh three considerations:

• Visibility and governance of agentic development

• Verification of AI-generated code and AI applications

• AI risk reduction at agentic speed

Teams now need coverage across all three, on one platform that shares context between them, and that is the standard we have been building toward.

A decade of conviction, pointed at where software is created now

Snyk has operated on a core belief for more than a decade: security belongs where software is created. We believe agentic development moves that point of creation inside the agent workflow, and that is where the Snyk AI Security Platform is built to operate. Forrester’s report states that "Snyk articulates a farsighted vision to secure AI-written code, the agents that run it, and the applications they build, while advancing secure-at-inception development and governance."

On capabilities, the report states that "Snyk brings security into developer and AI coding agent workflows through autofix and coding guardrails that secure AI- and human-generated code and block risky agent actions."  It also notes that Snyk's "strong AI dynamic testing uncovers business logic flaws and vulnerability chains and validates findings with working exploits."

How Evo by Snyk secures each layer of AI-driven development

Last year, Snyk expanded the Snyk AI Security Platform with Evo by Snyk, a suite of agent-native security solutions that secure, protect, and govern AI-driven development across three loops: the code artifact, the AI workforce, and the AI applications teams build. A validation layer tests all three.

• Evo Agentic AppSec: Secure the code artifact. AI security agents that find, fix, and block vulnerabilities at the speed agents write code, with every result verified independently. This includes Snyk Secrets for blocking leaked credentials. 

• Evo Agentic Development Security (ADS): Protect the AI workforce. Governs what AI coding agents use, what they do, and what they generate, from the MCP servers and skills they pull in to the code they write. This includes Snyk Studio for real-time guidance in AI coding workflows.

• Evo AI-SPM: Govern every AI app you build. Discovers and assesses risk of the models, agents, skills, and MCP servers in your software, generates a live AI-BOM, and turns AI policy into enforceable controls.

• Evo Continuous Offensive Security (COS): Validate every loop. Continuously tests applications and AI agents, leveraging Agent Red Teaming, and returns validated proof of what an attacker could actually exploit, so no loop grades its own work.

As AI takes on more of the work of building software, we believe its output needs a separate, deterministic layer to verify it. That is why Snyk pairs frontier AI reasoning with our deterministic engines and ten years of security intelligence, so organizations can adopt AI at full speed and stay accountable for what they ship.

What this means for teams building with AI agents

Forrester's take: "Snyk is a good fit for enterprises that want to accelerate agentic development while embedding security directly into agent workflows." For teams evaluating this market, three questions help separate tools built for agentic development from tools adapted to it:

• Governance: Can you see and control what your agents use, what they do, and what they generate before it ships?

• Remediation: Is your fix rate keeping pace with your rate of new risk, across new code and the existing backlog?

• Proof: What independent evidence shows your controls hold against a real attacker?

We are grateful to our customers, partners, and the developer community, whose feedback shapes the platform every day. We will keep investing inside the agent loop, where software is now created. Our mission remains the same: unleash AI innovators, securely.

Want the full picture of how Forrester evaluated this market? Get your complimentary copy of the report.

Curious how Snyk secures code, agents, and AI applications in your environment? Talk to an expert to see the platform in action.

About Forrester

Forrester does not endorse any company, product, brand, or service included in its research publications and does not advise any person to select the products or services of any company or brand based on the ratings included in such publications. Information is based on the best available resources. Opinions reflect judgment at the time and are subject to change. This report is part of a broader collection of Forrester resources, including interactive models, frameworks, tools, data, and access to analyst guidance. For more information, read about Forrester's objectivity here.