Fortinet Advances Continuous AI Protection with the Acquisition of Virtue AI
SUNNYVALE, Calif., Aug. 17, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Fortinet® (NASDAQ: FTNT), the global cybersecurity leader driving the convergence of networking and security, today announced 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 organizations 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. Organizations need to adopt AI with confidence, keep it secure in production, and trust it behaves as intended.
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 leading 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 behavior, 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 customizable policies across text, images, video, audio, and AI-generated code to keep 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 and 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.
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 organizations 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.
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 about Fortinet innovation, collaboration partners, product security processes, and enterprise-grade products.
- Follow Fortinet on X, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram. Subscribe to Fortinet on our blog or YouTube.
GARTNER is a trademark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates.
[1] Gartner, Forecasting the $16.4 Billion Opportunity in Securing AI, Shailendra Upadhyay, 30 July 2026
About Fortinet
Fortinet (Nasdaq: FTNT) is a driving force in the evolution of cybersecurity and the convergence of networking and security. Our mission is to secure people, devices, and data everywhere, and today we deliver cybersecurity everywhere our customers need it with the largest integrated portfolio of over 50 enterprise-grade products. Over a million lifetime customers trust Fortinet's solutions, which are among the most deployed, most patented, and most validated in the industry. The Fortinet Training Institute, one of the largest and broadest training programs in the industry, is dedicated to making cybersecurity training and new career opportunities available to everyone. Collaboration with esteemed organizations from both the public and private sectors, including Computer Emergency Response Teams (CERTS), government entities, and academia, is a fundamental aspect of Fortinet’s commitment to enhance cyber resilience globally. FortiGuard Labs, Fortinet’s elite threat intelligence and research organization, develops and utilizes leading-edge machine learning and AI technologies to provide customers with timely and consistently top-rated protection and actionable threat intelligence. Learn more at https://www.fortinet.com and https://www.fortinet.com/blog.
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