SOC-2 is table stakes now. Here's what actually matters for AI products.

A few years ago, having SOC-2 certification was a real differentiator. If you were selling to enterprise, that badge meant something. It signaled that you had your act together, that you took security seriously, that procurement could check a box and move on.

That's not the world we live in anymore.

Everyone has SOC-2 now

The compliance automation market exploded. Vanta, Drata, Oneleet, Secureframe, Sprinto. These tools made SOC-2 accessible to basically any startup with a few months of runway and some engineering time.

And that's genuinely a good thing. Security hygiene should be easy. The old way of getting SOC-2 was painful, expensive, and mostly involved consultants charging you to fill out spreadsheets. The new way is better for everyone.

But here's the consequence: when everyone has SOC-2, nobody has a competitive advantage from SOC-2.

I talk to a lot of companies selling AI products into enterprise. The pattern is always the same. They get on a call with procurement, they show the SOC-2 badge, and then procurement says "great, what else do you have?"

That "what else" question didn't exist three years ago. Now it's the whole conversation.

The AI security gap

SOC-2 was designed for a different era of software. It covers the basics: access controls, encryption, incident response, vendor management. Important stuff. But it was built for applications where the behavior is deterministic. You write code, the code runs, the output is predictable.

AI products don't work like that.

When you deploy an LLM-powered agent, you're deploying a system that makes decisions based on natural language input. It can be manipulated. It can leak data through its outputs. It can be tricked into taking actions it shouldn't take. None of this is covered by SOC-2.

Procurement teams have figured this out. Maybe not all of them, but the sophisticated ones. The CIOs who've read about prompt injection attacks. The security teams who've seen what happens when an AI chatbot goes off the rails. They're asking questions that SOC-2 doesn't answer.

Questions like:

How do you prevent prompt injection?
What happens if someone tries to extract training data?
Can this agent be manipulated into accessing data it shouldn't?
How do you test for adversarial attacks?
What guardrails are in place, and have they been validated?

Try answering these with your SOC-2 report. You can't.

What procurement actually wants

Here's what I'm seeing in the market. Enterprise buyers are starting to ask for evidence that AI products have been specifically tested for AI-related risks. Not just "do you have encryption at rest" but "have you red teamed this agent for prompt injection."

Some of them are building internal frameworks for evaluating AI vendors. Others are asking for third-party assessments. A few are starting to require AI-specific security documentation before they'll even start a pilot.

This is still early. Most procurement processes haven't caught up yet. But the direction is clear. SOC-2 gets you in the door. It doesn't close the deal.

The companies that figure this out first are going to have an advantage. If you can show up to a procurement call with SOC-2 plus actual evidence of AI security testing, you're ahead of 90% of your competitors. That gap won't last forever, but right now it's real.

What this means if you're selling AI products

First, keep your SOC-2. It's still required. It's just not sufficient.

Second, start thinking about how you demonstrate AI-specific security. This could mean:

Running red team assessments against your agents (we wrote about what we learned from 50 of these)
Implementing and documenting guardrails
Testing for prompt injection, data exfiltration, jailbreaks
Building an AI security page that goes beyond compliance badges

Third, get ahead of the questions. Don't wait for procurement to ask about prompt injection. Bring it up yourself. Show that you understand the risks and have addressed them. That level of proactivity builds trust in a way that a SOC-2 badge never will.

The new baseline is forming

Compliance frameworks will eventually catch up. There are already efforts to create AI-specific security standards. OWASP has their LLM Top 10. NIST is working on AI risk management. The EU AI Act is pushing companies toward more rigorous testing.

But frameworks move slowly. The market moves fast. If you wait for a standardized AI security certification to exist, you're going to be behind the companies that started demonstrating AI security on their own.

SOC-2 became table stakes because the tooling made it easy and the market made it mandatory. AI security is heading the same direction. The question is whether you're going to be ahead of that curve or behind it.

Right now, most companies are behind it. That's an opportunity if you move fast.