New Patent Protects Company’s Industry Lead in Identifying Over-Permissioned Users and is Concentric AI’s Third Patent Awarded in Less Than a Month
SAN JOSE, Calif., April 8, 2025—Concentric AI today announced earning its third recently awarded patent, recognizing the company’s continued innovation and pioneering efforts to advance data security. This latest patent furthers the company’s industry lead over the competition in AI-based identification of permission creep and over-permissioned users to protect sensitive data from inappropriate access.
The newly granted patent, “Methods and Systems for Identifying Anomalous Users Exhibiting Overreaching Access Permissions to Data Objects,” protects existing intellectual property for Concentric AI’s Semantic Intelligence™ data security governance platform. It recognizes the unique way the technology leverages document semantics to identify users who have unusual access permissions indicative of permission creep.
Detecting and identifying over-permissioned users is challenging because there is no easy way to define what constitutes correct permissions for each user at any given point in time. Documents and data that an enterprise user has access to evolve as employees move across projects and roles, causing users over time to accumulate access permissions to resources they no longer need, or permission creep. These unnecessary permissions create significant risks in the form of increased opportunities for inappropriate data access.
This new patent award comes on the heels of the recently announced “Methods and Systems for Clustering Documents based on Semantic Similarity” and “Method and Electronic Device for Managing Sensitive Data based on Semantic Categorization” patents, recognizing that Concentric AI is at the forefront of data security innovation tackling real-world data security challenges. The new patent highlights how Concentric AI uniquely addresses real-world enterprise challenges to help businesses implement the principles of zero trust and least privilege access.
“The most recent of four important patents awarded to Concentric AI, three of which have been awarded within three weeks of each other, addresses one of the most vexing challenges enterprises face when it comes to data security – the problem of permission creep,” said Karthik Krishnan, Concentric AI Founder and CEO. “Without a clear way to define appropriate access levels, it becomes difficult to accurately assess whether a user has been granted excessive or unnecessary permissions. Our unique technology provides a way for enterprises to identify over-permissioned users so they can address this risk.”
Concentric AI’s now patent-protected industry-first technology recognizes its unique ability to understand the semantics of the content within each data record and to categorize data assets by grouping similar documents together – without manual user efforts or error-prone rules – to help manage and secure entire repositories. This innovation leverages that capability to deliver state-of-the-art methods for identifying over-permissioned users and protecting sensitive data.
In large-scale environments, there is an ever-increasing volume of documents generated. Even mid-sized enterprises can easily accumulate tens or hundreds of millions of documents. This presents a significant challenge for security teams who are tasked with ensuring that sensitive information is adequately protected while remaining accessible to authorized personnel because manually determining the precise set of appropriate permissions for every user is neither practical nor feasible.
Unlike other data security tools, Concentric AI’s Semantic Intelligence data security governance solution scans organizations’ data records in their entirety. Its proprietary AI technology understands context to identify not just PII, PCI, and PHI data, but also more difficult types of sensitive data, including intellectual property and critical business documents. After discovery, it can identify the most appropriate classification category and autonomously tag the data. In addition, Semantic Intelligence monitors and autonomously identifies risks to sensitive data due to inappropriate permissions, wrong entitlements, and risky sharing. It can automatically remediate permissions and sharing issues or leverage other security solutions and cloud APIs to quickly and continuously protect at-risk data.
About Concentric AI
Concentric AI is intelligent data security made easy. Its AI-powered platform simplifies data management, helping businesses discover sensitive data, remediate risk, eliminate duplicates, and maintain compliance across cloud and on-premises environments. The solution provides clear insights into where data resides, who’s accessing it, how it’s being shared, and empowers organizations to take remediation actions. With co-managed services, Concentric AI handles the heavy lifting while organizations stay in control—defining policies, managing risks, and running reports on demand. From reducing costs to preventing data leaks, Concentric AI ensures your data works for you, not vice versa. Concentric AI is venture-backed by leading Silicon Valley VCs and is headquartered in San Jose, Calif. For more information, see https://www.concentric.ai.
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Concentric AI, Semantic Intelligence™, and Risk Distance™ are or may be registered trademarks of Concentric AI, Inc. All other marks and names mentioned herein may be trademarks of their respective companies.
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