Manifest Launches Industry's First AI Risk Transparency Solution as Enterprises Struggle to Secure AI

Manifest AI Risk illuminates supply chain risk for AI models and datasets, bringing
automation and real-time governance to enterprises

LAS VEGAS, Aug. 5, 2025 /PRNewswire/ -- Black Hat USA -- Manifest, the leader in software supply chain security, introduces Manifest AI Risk, the latest module part of the Manifest Platform, designed to help security and compliance teams secure their AI supply chains. The Manifest Platform is already used by Fortune 500 companies and critical government agencies. With the launch of AI Risk, Manifest delivers the first comprehensive solution designed specifically for AI transparency at enterprise scale, addressing the vital gap left by traditional security vendors and AI startups who either treat AI as separate from software or focus on narrow AI risks.

As enterprises race to adopt AI and leverage its efficiencies, security teams lack the tooling, data, and automation to open the black box that is AI. An AI transparency and governance solution, Manifest AI Risk illuminates vulnerabilities, provenance, software dependencies, and legal risks in AI models and their training data. The AI Risk module includes enterprise capabilities for continuous monitoring, inventory, and reporting across an organization's entire AI infrastructure. 

Read more about the AI transparency crisis: Why AI Transparency Can't Wait: The Critical Window for AI Supply Chain Security

AI Adoption Outpaces Industry's Ability to Secure It

The rapid adoption of AI across enterprise systems has created a governance crisis that traditional security tools are unable to address. Security, compliance, and legal teams are spending six to eight weeks manually vetting a single AI model, reading research papers, checking datasets, and verifying licenses. Organizations deploying dozens or hundreds of models face an impossible choice: accept unknown risks or grind development to a halt.

Manual AI governance creates strategic bottlenecks that slow competitive advantage. Executives need business-focused AI risk intelligence to make confident deployment decisions without technical complexity. Today, Manifest eliminates these bottlenecks, enabling executives to evaluate AI risks in minutes instead of weeks.

The rapid market adoption of the Manifest Platform reflects the urgent need for AI transparency. Manifest now safeguards over $100 billion in annual defense contracts while working with Fortune 500 organizations across the automotive, healthcare, and aerospace industries. The Manifest AI Risk module was developed through design partnerships with six Fortune 500 companies, ensuring enterprise-grade capabilities that address real-world AI governance challenges at scale.

"While everyone's been focused on AI ethics and compliance checkboxes, the real challenge is operational – knowing exactly what AI models you're running, where they're deployed, and what happens when something goes wrong," said Daniel Bardenstein, CTO and Co-founder of Manifest. "I have watched organizations spend months painstakingly and manually assessing AI model risks. Manifest AI Risk compresses that timeline to minutes, with just two clicks, by extracting and processing massive amounts of AI data. That's the difference between surviving an AI incident and being crushed by it."

Current approaches fail because they apply yesterday's security thinking to tomorrow's AI challenges. Code scanning tools find thousands of issues but miss AI-specific risks. AI security startups focus on niche attacks like prompt injection while ignoring basic legal compliance. Model platforms provide local inventories but lack deployment visibility. This fragmentation creates dangerous blind spots—a Log4j-style AI vulnerability demands immediate impact assessment, not weeks of analysis. Manifest AI Risk bridges technical complexity and executive decision-making, turning governance into proactive strategy.

Bringing Scale to AI Governance
Manifest AI Risk provides a robust framework for managing AI supply chain risks, enforcing policies, and facilitating rapid incident response at enterprise speed and scale. Unlike solutions that retrofit existing security approaches, Manifest AI Risk was purpose-built for AI transparency challenges:

AI Bill of Materials (AIBOM) Engine: The industry's first AIBOM functionality automatically discovers and inventories GenAI models, custom ML models, and AI-enabled applications across development and production environments. It tracks approved and requested models in a single dashboard while scanning source code to detect embedded AI models. Combining continuous discovery with real-time vulnerability monitoring, the engine transforms weeks-long manual evaluations into two-click assessments with instant visibility into model provenance and risks.

AI Governance Policy Engine: Manifest AI Risk enforces AI governance policies by continuously monitoring development across open-source and custom models. It restricts outdated models, originating from high-risk countries, that have prohibited licenses or lack training data transparency. Integrated with DevSecOps workflows, it detects models in source code and notebooks, triggering alerts when policies are violated. Beyond compliance, it delivers operational intelligence for strategic business decisions.

AI Risk Dashboard: Provides executive-grade visibility into AI supply chain risks with business-focused communication. The dashboard enables organizations to evaluate open-weight models from Hugging Face and other sources for undocumented training data, policy misalignment, and licensing restrictions. Automated prioritization highlights critical vulnerabilities, while strategic reporting supports board-level decision-making.

"Every executive asks me the same question: 'How do we know what's actually in our AI systems?' The answer has been 'you don't'—until now," said Marc Frankel, CEO and Co-founder of Manifest Cyber. "This isn't just applying our SBOM expertise to AI, it's recognizing that AI transparency requires an entirely different approach. The companies that gain visibility into their AI supply chains today will have the competitive edge tomorrow."

Learn More about AI Transparency:

• Join Daniel Bardenstein at Black Hat USA in the Startup City Theater for "Opening the Black Box: Why AI Supply Chain Security Can't Wait, on August 7 at 1:30 pm
• Read: Policy Framework for Safe Adoption of Open-Weight AI Models and Datasets

About Manifest
Manifest transforms how organizations manage software and AI risk. The Manifest Platform automates the creation and monitoring of Software and AI Bills of Materials (SBOMs), turning complex compliance requirements into actionable intelligence. Trusted by federal agencies and Fortune 500 companies, Manifest provides security teams with the tools to make actionable decisions and manage cyber risk at machine speed in an AI-driven world.

Founded in 2022 by cybersecurity leaders from CISA, DOD, Palantir, and Palo Alto Networks.
To learn more, visit https://www.manifestcyber.com and follow Manifest on LinkedIn.

Media Contact:
Carmen Angela Harris, for Manifest
[email protected]
Signal @techprcarm.64 

SOURCE Manifest Cyber, Inc.