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Fortinet acquires Virtue AI to enhance AI runtime protection

August 19, 2026

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Ken Xie, Founder, Chairman of the Board, and CEO at Fortinet

Fortinet, a global cybersecurity leader, today announced its acquisition of 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.

Its agentic system red-teaming capabilities test autonomous agents for exploitable weaknesses across more than 50 sandboxed environments and 14 high-stakes domains. This includes simulated prompt-injection and MCP-based attacks against leading agent frameworks.

Virtue AI also provides agent protection, governance, and visibility, giving organisations visibility into agents and AI tools running in their environments. It can discover unsanctioned AI applications and agents, scan MCP tools and source code for hidden risks, monitor agent behaviour, and block malicious tool calls before they act.

Continuous AI validation helps identify new risks across every model update and fine-tuning of policies, while generating audit-ready evidence to support security and compliance reviews. 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.

“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.

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 sys

TagsFortinet