Why DNSFilter Just Made Its Biggest Platform Expansion Yet Around AI, Threat Intel: CEO

While DNS is ‘still very core to what we do,’ the launch of the company’s Luminate platform extends the vendor’s capabilities into key areas such as AI governance and threat intelligence, DNSFilter CEO Ken Carnesi tells CRN.

A major platform expansion at cybersecurity vendor DNSFilter is accelerating the opportunity for solution and service provider partners to address fundamental AI challenges in a unique way—leveraging the company’s strong foundation in protecting DNS (Domain Name System) usage, co-founder and CEO Ken Carnesi told CRN.

After more than a decade focused mainly on DNS filtering, the company recently introduced its Luminate platform, which extends its capabilities into areas such as AI governance, behavior analytics, encrypted connectivity and threat intelligence.

The move comes amid the recognition that increasingly powerful AI agents must get their own security policies—even when they share an endpoint with a human worker, Carnesi said.

“Historically, there’s always been one person using an endpoint,” he said. “Now, there’s more than one thing using your machine. It’s you and at least one AI agent.”

That shift helped inspire Agent Shield, a component of the new Luminate platform designed to distinguish between traffic from AI agents and human activity—allowing security teams and partners to apply distinct controls to each.

Meanwhile, DNSFilter is also opening up the intelligence behind its filtering decisions to users—including security operations teams, threat hunters and analysts—as well as to organizations that don’t use its filtering product, the company said.

The recent launch represents a massive expansion of the Washington, D.C.-based vendor’s addressable market, Carnesi said. DNSFilter already serves about 57,000 organizations and a total of about 100 million people daily, he said.

For partners, the opportunity includes adding services within existing customer environments as well as gaining new clients with the threat intelligence offering, according to DNSFilter.

Crucially, however, the expansion remains firmly rooted in the company’s expertise and heritage in the DNS space, Carnesi said.

“While we’re expanding the offering, it’s still playing within DNS,” he said. “It’s still very core to what we do.”

Partner Perspective

For Thrive, a Foxborough, Mass.-based MSSP and DNSFilter partner, the launch of AI visibility capabilities in particular appears positioned to help address questions that customers are increasingly bringing forward, according to Thrive’s Kevin Landt.

Frequent questions from customers now include, “‘How do I know what AI tools are being used in my company? How do I know what type of data is going into them?’” said Landt, vice president of product for cybersecurity at Thrive, No. 105 on CRN’s 2026 Solution Provider 500.

“I think DNSFilter is well-positioned in terms of where they are in that chain—because they see the DNS query, and they have the ability to block it there before it gets to the tool itself,” he said. “So that’s attractive in terms of a security control. The other thing that’s nice is that it’s built into the existing platform. It uses the existing agent that we already have deployed at hundreds of clients.”

Separating Humans And Agents

As DNSFilter looks to bring its unique approach to addressing emerging AI-related security needs, there are countless situations where it’s clear that humans and agents need different security policies, Carnesi said.

For instance, while an employee might need access to a range of websites and applications, an AI agent assigned a specific task could be restricted to a bank’s website and NetSuite. DNSFilter’s Agent Shield tool also can extend to preventing desktop applications from launching, Carnesi said.

Behavior analytics, meanwhile, adds context about the applications and activity surrounding a suspicious link click, ultimately enabling security teams to investigate where a threat originated. “Most of the time, we’re stopping the event from occurring—but a customer would still want to know, ‘Where did this come from in the first place?’” Carnesi said.

The threat intelligence offering allows users to look up a domain and examine crucial information—such as details around how DNSFilter classifies it, when the company first observed traffic to it and how that traffic has changed, he said.

The offering thus creates an opportunity for partners to bring in additional customers—since “they’ll be able to buy this [offering] and get access to that massive set of data that we have,” Carnesi said.

Without a doubt, DNSFilter’s experience supporting MSPs and MSSPs is a major advantage, according to Thrive’s Landt.

For instance, some newer AI governance vendors require logging in individually to each client’s tenant, “which just isn’t manageable at the scale we operate at,” he said.

Ultimately, “the fact that they’re looking for ways to make more use of the data and bring more value to it—[including] better insights on what’s happening in the organization—I think is a smart move for them,” Landt said.