Fortinet, a prominent name in cybersecurity, has announced the acquisition of Virtue AI, a company specialising in AI runtime protection and security for autonomous AI systems.
This move supports Fortinet's ongoing efforts to advance its Security for AI strategy, enhancing its existing portfolio that includes the likes of the FortiGate Hyperscale Firewall. As businesses increasingly integrate AI applications and autonomous agents, their risk exposure grows beyond traditional networks and infrastructures to encompass new elements like AI models and agent frameworks.
Securing expanding AI landscapes
In response to the growing complexity of AI environments, Fortinet has developed FortiAIGate, which provides safeguards against threats such as prompt injections and model poisoning. With the integration of Virtue AI, these protections will now extend across the full lifecycle of AI models and applications. Virtue AI’s technology includes innovative features like:
- Agentic system red-teaming: Testing for vulnerabilities in over 50 sandboxed environments, targeting weaknesses in high-stakes domains through simulated attacks.
- Agent protection and visibility: Offering complete oversight of AI systems, detecting unsanctioned activities, and preemptively blocking harmful actions.
- Continuous AI validation: Employing exhaustive testing to identify risks during model updates, ensuring compliance and security through comprehensive reporting.
- Real-time guardrails: Implementing policies to block harmful content and protect sensitive data across media types.
Embracing the future of AI security
Fortinet continues to enhance its AI-native Security Fabric by integrating Virtue AI’s capabilities
Ken Xie, Founder and CEO of Fortinet, emphasises the importance of adapting security measures in line with rapid transformations in enterprise computing.
According to a Gartner report, the market for securing AI systems is poised to grow from $2.8 billion in 2026 to $16.4 billion by 2030, highlighting a significant industry shift towards robust AI security solutions. Fortinet views this anticipated growth as a reflection of increasing demands to safeguard emerging AI technologies.
Enhancing AI system confidence
Fortinet continues to enhance its AI-native Security Fabric by integrating Virtue AI’s capabilities, providing real-time security across networks, endpoints, and AI deployments.
With automated validation and coordinated enforcement, alongside insights from FortiGuard Labs, this acquisition empowers organisations to operate AI systems securely and with confidence. While the financial details of the transaction remain undisclosed, the strategic move underscores Fortinet’s commitment to leading AI security advancements.
Fortinet®, the global cybersecurity pioneer driving the convergence of networking and security, announces it has acquired Virtue AI, an innovator in AI runtime protection, automated AI validation, and security for autonomous AI systems. The acquisition advances the company’s broader Security for AI strategy and vision for securing the agentic enterprise, building on Fortinet's existing AI security solution portfolio, including its FortiGate Hyperscale Firewall.
As organisations rapidly deploy AI applications and autonomous agents, their attack surface expands beyond traditional networks, users, endpoints, applications, and cloud workloads. It now includes prompts, models, agents, Model Context Protocol (MCP) tools, application programming interface (API) calls, and AI infrastructure. Organisations need to adopt AI with confidence, keep it secure in production, and trust it behaves as intended.
Preventing harmful content
Fortinet met that need earlier this year with FortiAIGate, which safeguards large language models (LLMs) from prompt injections, data leakage, model poisoning, excessive resource consumption, and other emerging AI-specific risks. Virtue AI extends that security to AI models, applications, and agentic systems, from development through runtime, leveraging Virtue AI’s Guardian Agent abilities and key product capabilities, 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 agent frameworks.
- Agent protection, governance, and visibility: Provides full visibility into agents and AI tools running in their environment, discovers unsanctioned AI applications and agents, scans MCP tools and source code for hidden risks, monitors agent behaviour, and blocks malicious tool calls before they act.
- Continuous AI validation: Identifies new risks across every model update and fine-tuning of policies, while generating audit-ready evidence to support security and compliance reviews. The automated red-teaming runs across 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 customisable policies across text, images, video, audio, and AI-generated code to prevent harmful content, sensitive data, jailbreaks, and vulnerable code from reaching users or downstream systems.
Anticipated market expansion
“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 that anticipated market expansion reflects evolving industry demand to secure the AI era.
Real-time protection
Customers already rely on the Fortinet AI-native Security Fabric for integrated protection across networks, endpoints, clouds, applications, and AI deployments. This acquisition complements FortiAIGate and further strengthens Fortinet’s AI runtime security capabilities with Virtue AI’s automated validation and real-time protection. Combined with coordinated enforcement and FortiGuard Labs threat intelligence, it will give organisations the confidence to secure AI systems throughout their lifecycle.
Financial terms of the transaction are not disclosed, and the amount paid by Fortinet as consideration is immaterial to Fortinet’s business.
