Virtue AI will enhance the Fortinet AI-Native Security Fabric with continuous agentic AI validation and runtime protection across the AI lifecycle
Fortinet® (NASDAQ: FTNT), the global cybersecurity leader driving the convergence of networking and security, today announced the acquisition of Virtue AI, an innovator in AI runtime protection, automated AI validation, and security for autonomous AI systems.
The acquisition advances Fortinet’s broader Security for AI strategy and its vision for securing the agentic enterprise, building on the company’s existing AI security portfolio, including the FortiGate Hyperscale Firewall.
As organizations rapidly deploy AI applications and autonomous agents, the attack surface is expanding far beyond traditional networks, users, endpoints, applications, and cloud workloads. It now encompasses prompts, models, agents, Model Context Protocol (MCP) tools, application programming interface (API) calls, and AI infrastructure.
With AI becoming increasingly embedded in enterprise operations, organizations need to adopt the technology with confidence, keep AI systems secure in production, and ensure they behave as intended.
Fortinet addressed this growing need earlier this year with FortiAIGate, which safeguards large language models (LLMs) against prompt injections, data leakage, model poisoning, excessive resource consumption, and other emerging AI-specific risks.
The addition of Virtue AI extends that protection across AI models, applications, and agentic systems—from development through runtime—leveraging Virtue AI’s Guardian Agent capabilities and key product technologies, including:
- Agentic system red-teaming: Tests autonomous agents for exploitable weaknesses across more than 50 sandboxed environments and 14 high-stakes domains, including simulated prompt-injection and MCP-based attacks against leading agent frameworks.
- Agent protection, governance, and visibility: Provides comprehensive visibility into agents and AI tools operating within an environment, identifies unsanctioned AI applications and agents, scans MCP tools and source code for hidden risks, monitors agent behavior, and blocks malicious tool calls before they can act.
- Continuous AI validation: Identifies emerging risks across every model update and policy fine-tuning while generating audit-ready evidence to support security and compliance reviews. Automated red-teaming covers hundreds of attack vectors and more than 1,000 risk categories, with multimodal testing and on-demand reporting for security, risk, and compliance teams.
- Real-time guardrails: Enforces customizable policies across text, images, video, audio, and AI-generated code to help prevent harmful content, sensitive data, jailbreaks, and vulnerable code from reaching users or downstream systems.
“AI is fundamentally changing enterprise computing, and security must evolve just as quickly,” said Ken Xie, Founder, Chairman of the Board, and Chief Executive Officer at Fortinet. “Virtue AI’s technology will advance our vision for continuous AI assurance, helping customers govern and protect AI systems throughout their lifecycle while operating them confidently at enterprise scale.”
According to Gartner®, “the market for securing AI ecosystems and AI agents is rapidly expanding; products and tools are expected to expand from $2.8 billion in 2026 to $16.4 billion by 2030.”¹ Fortinet believes this anticipated market expansion reflects the rapidly evolving industry demand for security solutions designed for the AI era.
Customers already rely on the Fortinet AI-native Security Fabric for integrated protection across networks, endpoints, clouds, applications, and AI deployments.
The Virtue AI acquisition complements FortiAIGate while further strengthening Fortinet’s AI runtime security capabilities through Virtue AI’s automated validation and real-time protection. Combined with coordinated enforcement and FortiGuard Labs threat intelligence, the expanded capabilities are designed to give organizations greater confidence in securing AI systems throughout their entire lifecycle.
Financial terms of the transaction were not disclosed, and the amount paid by Fortinet as consideration is immaterial to Fortinet’s business.
Additional Resources
- Read more about the Fortinet AI-Native Security Fabric.
- Learn how Fortinet secures the AI Application Stack with FortiAIGate.
- Visit fortinet.com/trust to learn more about Fortinet innovation, collaboration partners, product security processes, and enterprise-grade products.
- Follow Fortinet on X, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram. Subscribe to the Fortinet blog or YouTube channel.
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