The Agentic Web is coming—and sooner than you think: Dr. Tom Leighton, Co-founder & CEO, Akamai

Source: ET CIO

From Clicking to Agents

Akamai co-founder and CEO Dr. Tom Leighton says the web is about to undergo its biggest shift since mobile. In a new interview with ET CIO, he argues that within a decade, most web interaction will happen through AI agents rather than human clicks and keystrokes. "There won't be many sites, and it will be mostly agents," Leighton said.

That vision has direct implications for WAF and CDN infrastructure. The agentic web demands distributed compute at the edge, not centralized in a handful of data centers. Leighton points to Akamai's network of over 4,000 points of presence across 700 cities as a structural advantage when inference needs to happen close to the user.

AI Models Under Active Attack

Leighton describes a new attack surface that traditional WAFs were not designed for. Adversaries can inject false information into AI models through prompts, tricking them into revealing sensitive data or source code. Worse, because many models learn continuously from user queries, malicious prompts can poison the model itself.

In response, Akamai has built what it calls a first-generation AI firewall. The system sits between the user and the inference engine, inspecting queries for legitimacy before ingestion and checking responses for data leakage. It is a new category of protection that sits alongside, not instead of, traditional WAF capabilities.

WAFplanet Take

Leighton is not the first to talk about an agentic web, but when the CEO of one of the largest CDN and security providers says it, it carries weight. The AI firewall concept is still early but it fills a gap that Cloudflare and others will inevitably need to address too. The interesting question is whether these AI firewalls become a standalone product category or get absorbed into existing WaaS and CDN security bundles. Akamai is betting on the former.