NetEase Zhiyi Unveils Agent Guard and External Security Control Plane for Enterprise AI Agents at WAIC 2026
NetEase Zhiyi showcased its latest enterprise AI security offerings at WAIC 2026 in Shanghai, highlighting the need for both internal model safeguards and an independent external security layer as AI Agents become more autonomous.
The event underscored growing concerns that rapid AI advancement and widespread Agent adoption introduce risks far beyond content generation, extending to autonomous planning, decision-making, and task execution that could impact critical infrastructure in finance, energy, communications, and transportation.
NetEase Zhiyi, a one-stop enterprise AI service provider under NetEase, serves millions of companies across entertainment, social, gaming, retail, manufacturing, and finance sectors. At the conference it presented the Emperor Crab enterprise AI Agent platform alongside the Agent Guard security product, along with private-domain assistants and AI customer-service tools.
According to Zhu Haoqi, vice general manager of NetEase Zhiyi, stronger intelligence requires security constraints independent of the model itself. The company advocates building an auditable, updatable external “security control plane” that monitors input, output, tool calls, and permission execution.
This external layer functions similarly to the brainstem, enabling instinctive risk avoidance without involving the model’s higher reasoning processes. It detects prompt injection, jailbreak attempts, and malicious requests at the input stage, performs real-time auditing and hallucination detection at the output stage, and continuously monitors Agent tool invocations and execution results.
Agent Guard implements a “map, control, isolate, terminate” framework: first discovering all Agents and their connected tools, then analyzing intent and sensitive data flows, followed by whitelisting and sandbox isolation, and finally blocking anomalous behavior when necessary.
NetEase Zhiyi also described internal safety capabilities that clean multimodal training data, label safety datasets, and evaluate models before deployment, reducing inherited risks from unfiltered corpora.
Market research firm IDC forecasts the Chinese AI security market will expand from 44.1 billion RMB in 2025 to 340.3 billion RMB by 2030, reflecting a compound annual growth rate of 50.5 percent.
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