Fortinet Virtue AI Acquisition Advances Continuous AI Protection

Fortinet’s acquisition of Virtue AI expands its AI security strategy with continuous validation, agentic system protection, automated red-teaming, and real-time guardrails designed to help enterprises secure AI throughout its lifecycle.

• AI Security Expansion: Fortinet has acquired Virtue AI to strengthen its broader Security for AI strategy, adding technology for AI runtime protection, automated validation, and security for autonomous AI systems as enterprises increasingly deploy AI applications and agents.
• Continuous Protection: Virtue AI brings capabilities spanning agentic system red-teaming, agent governance and visibility, continuous AI validation, and real-time guardrails, extending protection across AI models, applications, agents, MCP tools, APIs, and infrastructure from development through runtime.
• Growing Market: Gartner projects that the market for securing AI ecosystems and AI agents will expand from $2.8 billion in 2026 to $16.4 billion by 2030, highlighting the increasing importance of protecting enterprise AI as adoption accelerates.

As artificial intelligence becomes more deeply embedded in enterprise operations, Fortinet is expanding its security capabilities to address a new generation of threats. The cybersecurity company has acquired Virtue AI, an innovator specializing 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 of securing what it calls the agentic enterprise. It also builds on the company's existing AI security portfolio as organizations increasingly move beyond experimenting with artificial intelligence and begin putting AI applications and autonomous agents into production environments.

For enterprises, that transition brings a much broader attack surface. Security is no longer limited to traditional networks, endpoints, users, applications, and cloud workloads. Prompts, AI models, autonomous agents, Model Context Protocol or MCP tools, application programming interface calls, and the infrastructure supporting AI systems have also become areas that organizations need to protect.

Extending Fortinet's AI Security Strategy

Earlier this year, Fortinet introduced FortiAIGate to safeguard large language models or LLMs against AI-specific threats. These include prompt injections, data leakage, model poisoning, excessive resource consumption, and other emerging risks associated with enterprise AI deployments.

Virtue AI extends that approach by bringing additional security capabilities to AI models, applications, and agentic systems across development and runtime. Its technology includes Guardian Agent abilities designed to help organizations continuously assess and protect increasingly autonomous AI environments.

This is particularly important as businesses place greater responsibility in the hands of AI agents. Rather than simply generating text or responding to questions, autonomous systems may interact with tools, applications, APIs, and other resources, creating new security considerations that traditional cybersecurity approaches were not necessarily built to address on their own.

Red-Teaming Autonomous AI Agents

One of Virtue AI's key capabilities is agentic system red-teaming, which tests autonomous agents for exploitable weaknesses across more than 50 sandboxed environments and 14 high-stakes domains.

The testing includes simulated prompt-injection and MCP-based attacks against leading agent frameworks. This gives organizations a way to identify potential vulnerabilities before those weaknesses can become larger problems within real-world deployments.

Virtue AI also provides visibility into agents and AI tools operating within an organization's environment. Its technology can discover unsanctioned AI applications and agents, scan MCP tools and source code for hidden risks, monitor agent behavior, and block malicious tool calls before they are executed.

This combination of visibility and protection could become increasingly valuable as enterprises deploy more AI systems across different teams and workflows. Knowing which AI applications and agents are active, as well as understanding what they are doing, becomes part of maintaining control over a rapidly changing technology environment.

Continuous Validation Across AI Updates

AI security cannot necessarily be treated as a one-time assessment because models and policies continue to evolve. Virtue AI addresses this through continuous AI validation designed to identify new risks across every model update and fine-tuning of policies.

Its automated red-teaming operates across hundreds of attack vectors and more than 1,000 risk categories. The platform also supports multimodal testing and on-demand reporting for security, risk, and compliance teams.

Beyond identifying vulnerabilities, the technology generates audit-ready evidence that can support security and compliance reviews. This provides organizations with documentation as they assess whether their AI environments continue to meet internal policies and other requirements.

Virtue AI also offers real-time guardrails that enforce customizable policies across text, images, video, audio, and AI-generated code. These guardrails are intended to prevent harmful content, sensitive information, jailbreaks, and vulnerable code from reaching users or downstream systems.

Building Continuous AI Assurance

Ken Xie, Founder, Chairman of the Board, and Chief Executive Officer at Fortinet, underscored how rapidly security requirements are changing alongside enterprise AI adoption.

"AI is fundamentally changing enterprise computing, and security must evolve just as quickly," said Ken Xie. "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."

Fortinet sees this acquisition as complementary to FortiAIGate and its broader AI-native Security Fabric, which customers already use for integrated protection spanning networks, endpoints, clouds, applications, and AI deployments.

Virtue AI's automated validation and real-time protection will further strengthen Fortinet's AI runtime security capabilities. Together with coordinated enforcement and FortiGuard Labs threat intelligence, Fortinet aims to provide protection that follows AI systems throughout their lifecycle rather than addressing only one stage of deployment.

AI Security Market Set to Grow

The acquisition also arrives as demand for dedicated AI security technologies is expected to grow substantially. According to Gartner, the market for securing AI ecosystems and AI agents is projected to expand from $2.8 billion in 2026 to $16.4 billion by 2030.

Fortinet believes this anticipated growth reflects the industry's evolving need to secure AI as enterprises increasingly integrate the technology into their operations.

The addition of Virtue AI positions Fortinet to address that shift through a combination of AI validation, runtime protection, agent visibility, red-teaming, governance, and real-time guardrails. For organizations moving deeper into autonomous AI, these capabilities are designed to provide greater confidence that their systems remain secure and behave as intended.

Financial terms of Fortinet's acquisition of Virtue AI were not disclosed. According to Fortinet, the amount paid as consideration is immaterial to its business.