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The first half of 2026 is coming to a close. And unless you live under a rock, there is only one takeaway: The AI SOC revolution is here, and Torq is winning.
It started in January 2026: Torq secured our $140 million Series D, led by Merlin Ventures, with every single one of our existing investors doubling down, launching Torq into unicorn status at $1.2 billion and fueling the future of the agentic SOC.
Shortly after, Forbes said Torq is the “de facto leader of the AI SOC space,” noting that while the AI SOC boom is real, the work here at Torq started long before the buzz.
In March 2026, Torq became the Cursor of Security Operations, with agentic building capabilities that turn human intent into production-grade AI Agents in minutes, capable of handling triage, investigation, and response across every security solution in the SOC. This was a game-changer for CISOs and SOC leaders looking for a quick-start button for their AI SOC initiative.
In April 2026, Torq was named a Leader by KuppingerCole Analysts in all four categories for the AI SOC Category: Overall, Product, Innovation, and Market in the 2026 KuppingerCole Analysts Leadership Compass: The Emerging AI SOC (Document #81057)
Then, in May, in the Gartner® report AI Vendor Race: Torq Is the Company to Beat in AI SOC Agents for Threat Investigation (Document ID: G00855833), Gartner names Torq the Company to Beat.
It’s no surprise that the AI SOC space is moving fast, but it’s clear that Torq is leading the pack. So let’s talk about why and how.
The AI SOC Land Grab
The threat landscape is massively different than it was two years ago, heck, even six months ago. Attackers are using AI to develop and deploy the most convincing attacks ever seen, at a lower cost than ever before, and with a lower technical barrier to entry. According to CrowdStrike’s 2026 Global Threat Report, AI has enabled the bad guys to ramp attacks 89% year over year, with the fastest break-in they tracked taking only 27 seconds. What used to take months to build now takes hours.
Human-speed defense is no longer the answer to machine-speed attacks, and the market understood that. The problem is, the market overcorrected. Every vendor with an AI chatbot or a triage-only point solution wrapped their website in AI SOC messaging.
To start 2026, roughly 60 vendors claimed to be “AI SOC”; now there are over 100. We’ve seen the confusion firsthand, with different analyst firms defining the space in completely different ways. But the ones who spend the time to do the research — Gartner, KuppingerCole, and more — are reporting a consistent through line: end-to-end threat management, deep integrations across the entire security portfolio, and enterprise scalability.
Some influencers even claim the AI SOC market is already commoditized; we completely disagree. That’s a convenient argument if your product is triage-only, because that space is crowded and there’s no sign of growth slowing any time soon. The space is not commoditized; it’s fragmented. Broken up by hundreds of vendors calling different tools by the same name, leading to SOC teams making purchase decisions they will regret in six months when they realize agentic triage and an AI SOC platform are not one and the same, and defining it as such only works if you believe triage is all the SOC ever needs to do. But as we know, the work doesn’t end there.
Triage-Gate: The AI SOC Definition Rendition
Let’s be specific about what triage-only tools do and don’t do.
Triage does one thing: it prioritizes risk. It tells you which alerts are real and which aren’t, ranks them by severity, and recommends what should happen next. It doesn’t matter if you work in a Fortune 100 enterprise security operations center, or work in the front of an Emergency Room at the hospital. Triage, by definition, remains the same. Who is bleeding out and needs immediate emergency medical intervention? Who is more benign and can be handled with a simple automated email quarantine, followed by an IP address added to the company block list?
Here’s what triage doesn’t do: It doesn’t investigate a threat. It doesn’t contain it. It doesn’t remediate it. It doesn’t close the case. It simply analyzes the risk, reaches a conclusion, hands a to-do list to a human analyst, and then it’s done.
That means triage-only AI still ends with a human opening a ticket at the start of the actual security work. The investigation is still happening manually, and the evidence is gathered by hand, across disparate tools and queries. The response action requires an incident responder to log into a separate platform and make the necessary calls.
That is, by no means to say that AI alert triage isn’t valuable. In fact, alert volume has become so unmanageable in modern SecOps that, in Torq’s 2026 AI SOC Leadership Report, 97% of respondents reported confidence in AI’s ability to address the problem. However, from that same report:
- 37% are actually using AI for triage
- 90% reported challenges with AI Triage
- 80% rely on multiple point-specific tools
- 80% say this creates operational complexity
And therein lies the problem. The queue is prioritized, sure, but the SOC is still functioning at human speed. The bottleneck has moved. The enterprise remains exposed. The attackers still have the upper hand.
Torq Auto Triage: Going Beyond Analysis
This is not a knock on triage as a function; it’s a knock on calling it an AI SOC when the job isn’t finished. Torq Auto Triage is a key function of the Torq AI SOC Platform. Our customers leveraging Torq Auto Triage report 60x improvement in triage velocity, a mean-time-to-triage (MTTT) of 45 seconds, at a 97% reduction in EDR noise alone — with ruthless accuracy across hundreds of thousands of alerts per week in some of the largest Fortune 500 companies in the world.

Torq Auto Triage is the agentic engine that applies business context, threat intelligence, and historical case knowledge to deliver verdicts, suppress noise across your SOC, and prioritize threats that actually matter before they become incidents. Most importantly, however, Torq Auto Triage is fully integrated into the entire Torq AI SOC Platform, which then takes the baton through deeper investigation, containment, and remediation actions — all while continuously improving accuracy by grounding every decision in the Torq Context Graph.
A true AI SOC has to do everything a SOC does — not triage only, but manage the complete threat lifecycle from alert through resolution. That means triage, investigation, response, and case closure. And that is the difference.
Torq’s deep-rooted history in agentic SecOps and automation means we are not only capable of triaging the alerts firing from every corner of your SOC, but investigating and responding to threats across every security tool you integrate into the platform.
The complete security stack, the complete threat lifecycle, the complete AI SOC Platform.
The AI SOC Bar Should Be Higher
The AI SOC market is crowded, and it’s only getting louder with new vendors emerging from stealth mode what seems like every day. Most of them solve the narrow problem of triage, leveraging AI to ingest alerts, enrich them with threat intelligence, and surface a verdict to the awaiting human team. Others are beginning to add threat hunting capabilities to the mix, not because it’s the logical next step, but because it’s the only remaining SOC function that doesn’t require them to crack the code on taking action.
That should be table stakes. The bar needs to be higher. And Torq is setting it.
The questions SOC teams need to ask are:
- Once you’ve triaged the alert and surfaced the risk, what happens next?
- Who handles the investigation?
- Does the AI agent contain the threat and stop the spread before wasting more valuable exposure time escalating the proposed response plan to the analyst?
- Can the platform automatically remediate the Tier 1 and Tier 2 threats that don’t require human intervention?
- Does it integrate with the security stack your team has already built to ensure complete visibility into every possible IOC?
- Does it learn from, and remember, analyst exceptions, escalations and deviations from SOP so its verdicts aren’t based on last month’s playbooks, before the next VoidLink-level AI-generated threat changes everything about how your SOC operates?
If the answer stops at “we surface the risk,” then that is a useful tool, but it’s not an AI SOC.
Per our 2026 research, 92% of security leaders cite at least one factor actively reducing their trust in AI in the SOC today. Black-box reasoning was the number-one concern for SOC directors specifically. An AI that hands you a verdict without showing its work doesn’t solve the trust problem; it defers it until the first false positive blows up a production system at 2am. Deploying agentic AI without the right guardrails is its own category of risk.
What a Real AI SOC Platform Looks Like
The Torq AI SOC Platform runs the complete end-to-end threat lifecycle, and fast. At Carvana, Torq handles 100% of Tier 1 security alerts. A global biotech enterprise recently reported a 97% noise reduction in EDR alert triage and a 92% decrease in mean-time-to-resolve (MTTR) from the full Torq AI SOC Platform, in just their first quarter, leveraging the platform.
| Torq Agentic AI handles 100% of Tier 1 security alerts. Carvana | In the first quarter, Torq delivered a 97% noise reduction in EDR alert triage and a 92% decrease in MTTR. Global Biotech Enterprise |
These are real stories, across real enterprise customers, and they don’t stop there. Torq processes more than 1 billion automated actions across our customer base each week, including Chipotle, LEGO, Marriott, Procter & Gamble, Scotts, Siemens, Valvoline, and Virgin Atlantic.
When Gartner named Torq the Company to Beat in AI SOC Agents for Threat Investigation in May 2026, they mentioned Torq’s “combination of deterministic and agentic reasoning, multi-agent system, and model context protocol integration makes it the pacesetter in AI SOC agents for threat investigations.” 1

Here’s how it works:
Torq Auto Triage handles ingestion and prioritization, normalizes alerts to the Open Cybersecurity Schema Framework (OCSF), enriches every alert with commercial and OSINT threat intelligence, plus your own organizational context, and applies agentic reasoning to separate real risk from noise. Verdicts come with MITRE ATT&CK® mapping, severity scoring, and full transparency into how the conclusion was reached. True positives don’t generate a recommendation; they automatically become cases in Torq Case Management, with context already assembled and next steps already queued.
From there, Torq SocratesTM, the core orchestrator of the Torq AI SOC Platform, takes over. Socrates plans and coordinates specialized Torq HyperAgents™ that investigate cases, gather evidence, build timelines, and document their reasoning in real time. SecOps engineers simply describe what they need in plain language, and Socrates agentically builds these production-ready AI agents in minutes.
None of this works without the deep integration of Torq HyperautomationTM, and this is where the breadth matters. Torq has over 400+ pre-built integrations across EDR, IAM, SIEM, Network, Email, Cloud, and more. Creating a new integration point to feed alerts into the Torq AI SOC Platform is simple with Socrates’ agentic builder capabilities. Whether a use case is common or completely custom, the platform can handle it — and building new automated security actions no longer requires weeks of engineering work. Bottom line, your existing security stack stays.
With the platform configured and the triage verdicts rolling in, Socrates orchestrates the whole operation, managing case handoffs, executing response actions, and closing cases when the work is done. Over 90% of cases close completely autonomously, while the analysts focus on what actually needs human judgment.
Finally, the Torq Context Graph and memory layer powers every agentic decision in a live, continuously updated model of your environment, grounding each verdict in your environment’s truth and your analysts’ past judgments.
Two mechanisms power that memory: Recall, which surfaces the most relevant historical case precedents each time a new alert arrives, and Reflex, a per-tenant model, developed by Torq Labs, that trains continuously on your team’s confirmed verdicts and corrections. This means every Auto Triage verdict, every Torq HyperAgents investigation, and every autonomous Socrates response is based on the same organizational context, improving the decision-making with each alert prioritized and case closed. A single through line, grounding the AI SOC in real context, across the complete SecOps lifecycle.
The Verdict is the Start, Not the Finish
The AI-generated threat landscape that SecOps teams are operating in today is not going to simplify. Attacks will get faster, more convincing, and harder to keep up with. The velocity gap between machine-speed offense and human-speed defense cannot be closed by a tool that prioritizes risk and then hands it back to a human.
You need an AI SOC Platform that goes beyond analysis — triages, investigates, contains, and remediates at machine speed, with complete transparency into every decision. That’s the blueprint 450 security leaders described when asked what a real AI SOC should do, and that’s what the Torq AI SOC Platform delivers.
Triage gets you to the starting line, but what wins the race is everything that comes after it.
See the full threat lifecycle in action. Get a demo.
1 Gartner, AI Vendor Race: Torq Is the Company to Beat in AI SOC Agents for Threat Investigation (Document ID: G00855833)
Gartner, AI Vendor Race: Torq Is the Company to Beat in AI SOC Agents for Threat Investigation, Tom Powledge, Matt Milone, 25 May 2026.
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