Cohesity opens data protection to AI agents with headless architecture

Cohesity has announced Cohesity Maestro, which it claims is the industry’s first 'headless' data-security architecture.

This aims to let enterprises drive Cohesity's data-protection, recovery and search functions from the AI assistants they already use, including Anthropic’s Claude, OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini, without opening a Cohesity console.

The approach makes the full Cohesity Data Cloud - cyber-resilience operations, real-time telemetry, autonomous agents and its Gaia AI search engine - natively accessible through the Model Context Protocol (MCP), the open standard for connecting AI models to external tools.

Cohesity likened the shift to the way Salesforce made its CRM commandable by external AI agents through open standards, and positioned Maestro as “open by design”, integrating with whichever AI platforms a customer has standardised on rather than, as it characterised some rivals as doing, building a walled garden.

Through MCP, Cohesity said, teams can trigger data-protection actions such as backups, restores, threat hunting and recovery orchestration; pull real-time security telemetry and threat signals into any AI workflow; run semantic search across protected data via Cohesity Gaia (for Gaia customers); and call its existing AI agents - Cohesity Copilot for conversational reporting, anomaly detection and operational actions, and Cohesity RecoveryAgent for recovery orchestration.

Those actions remain governed by the same role-based access controls, authentication and audit framework as direct platform access. In practice, the company claimed, an operations team could ask what changed across its environment in the last 24 hours, surface a prioritised view of business-critical risks and recovery gaps, and trigger a restore — all from the AI tool already in front of them.

“Claude, Gemini, and GPT already run operations on these platforms, which grow in capability every day. Cohesity Maestro gives those platforms direct access to our data protection capabilities,” said Sanjay Poonen, chief executive of Cohesity.

"No new console. No workflow changes. Just the power of Cohesity, wherever their AI already lives. This is what headless data protection looks like, and Cohesity is the first in our industry to deliver it."

Cohesity Copilot, RecoveryAgent and Gaia support for MCP are available now. The full Cohesity Maestro MCP interface and additional agents are expected later this year, with early access available on request.