Fortinet has acquired AI security innovator Virtue AI to bolster its defense capabilities for autonomous AI systems, applications, and models from development through runtime.
The move advances Fortinet’s broader Security for AI strategy and targets the security challenges created by the rise of the agentic enterprise. As organizations deploy AI applications and autonomous agents, traditional attack surfaces—networks, users, endpoints, and cloud workloads—are expanding to include prompts, models, agents, Model Context Protocol (MCP) tools, application programming interface (API) calls, and AI infrastructure.
The acquisition builds on Fortinet’s existing AI security portfolio, which includes the FortiGate Hyperscale Firewall and FortiAIGate. Launched earlier this year, FortiAIGate safeguards large language models (LLMs) from prompt injections, data leakage, model poisoning, excessive resource consumption, and other AI-specific risks.
Virtue AI expands this protection layer by integrating its Guardian Agent capabilities and four core operational features:
- Agentic System Red-Teaming: Tests autonomous agents for vulnerabilities across more than 50 sandboxed environments and 14 high-stakes domains, simulating prompt-injection and MCP-based attacks against leading agent frameworks.
- Agent Protection, Governance, and Visibility: Maps all agents and AI tools across an environment, discovers unsanctioned AI applications, scans MCP tools and source code for hidden risks, monitors agent behavior, and blocks malicious tool calls before execution.
- Continuous AI Validation: Evaluates risks following model updates or policy fine-tuning while generating audit-ready evidence for compliance reviews. Automated red-teaming covers hundreds of attack vectors and over 1,000 risk categories using multimodal testing and on-demand reporting.
- Real-Time Guardrails: Enforces custom policies across text, images, video, audio, and AI-generated code to prevent jailbreaks, harmful content, sensitive data exposure, and vulnerable code from reaching 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.”
The strategic shift comes as demand for specialized AI safeguards accelerates. 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.”
Virtue AI’s runtime protection and automated validation will integrate into the Fortinet AI-native Security Fabric alongside FortiGuard Labs threat intelligence, giving enterprise customers unified lifecycle security across networks, endpoints, clouds, and AI deployments.
Financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed, and Fortinet confirmed the purchase price is immaterial to its overall business.
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