Singapore – Fortinet (NASDAQ: FTNT) has acquired Virtue AI, a specialist in AI runtime protection, automated AI validation, and security for autonomous AI systems. The deal deepens the cybersecurity giant’s Security for AI strategy and supports its broader push to secure the agentic enterprise.
The move builds directly on Fortinet’s existing AI security portfolio, which already includes its FortiGate Hyperscale Firewall. As a result, the company now has a more complete offering spanning network-level protection and AI-specific runtime defence.
Meanwhile, the pressure driving this expansion is mounting. Organisations are rolling out AI applications and autonomous agents at pace, and in doing so, their attack surface is stretching well beyond traditional networks, users, endpoints, applications, and cloud workloads.
Consequently, that surface now extends to prompts, models, agents, Model Context Protocol (MCP) tools, application programming interface (API) calls, and AI infrastructure itself. For enterprises, this shift raises a pressing question: how do they adopt AI with confidence while keeping it secure and trustworthy in production?
Fortinet first addressed part of that challenge earlier this year with FortiAIGate, a platform built to safeguard large language models (LLMs) from prompt injections, data leakage, model poisoning, and excessive resource consumption, among other AI-specific risks. Virtue AI now extends that protection further, covering AI models, applications, and agentic systems from development through to runtime.
This is made possible through Virtue AI’s Guardian Agent capabilities, which bring several core functions into the fold:
- 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: Gives organisations full sight of the 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 can act.
- Continuous AI validation: Identifies new risks with every model update and policy fine-tuning, while generating audit-ready evidence for security and compliance reviews. The automated red-teaming spans 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, preventing harmful content, sensitive data exposure, jailbreaks, and vulnerable code from reaching users or downstream systems.
Together, these capabilities move Fortinet’s AI protection well beyond the model layer alone.
Commenting on the acquisition, Ken Xie, Founder, Chairman of the Board, and Chief Executive Officer at Fortinet, said, “AI is fundamentally changing enterprise computing, and security must evolve just as quickly. 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.”
His remarks come against a backdrop of rapid market growth. 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.”
Fortinet, for its part, views that projected expansion as a reflection of evolving industry demand to secure the AI era. It is a demand the company is now positioning itself to meet more directly.
Customers already rely on the Fortinet AI-native Security Fabric for integrated protection across networks, endpoints, clouds, applications, and AI deployments. With this acquisition, Fortinet is set to complement FortiAIGate further and strengthen its AI runtime security capabilities through Virtue AI’s automated validation and real-time protection.
