Fortinet, a global cybersecurity company focused on the convergence of networking and security, has acquired Virtue AI, an innovator 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 for securing the agentic enterprise, building on the company’s existing AI security portfolio, including its FortiGate Hyperscale Firewall.
As organisations rapidly deploy AI applications and autonomous agents, their attack surfaces are expanding beyond traditional networks, users, endpoints, applications and cloud workloads. They now include prompts, models, agents, Model Context Protocol (MCP) tools, application programming interface (API) calls and AI infrastructure. Organisations therefore need to adopt AI with confidence, keep it secure in production and ensure it behaves as intended.
Fortinet addressed this requirement earlier this year with FortiAIGate, which safeguards large language models (LLMs) against prompt injection, 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 its Guardian Agent capabilities.
Virtue AI’s capabilities include agentic system red-teaming, which tests 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.
The technology also provides agent protection, governance and visibility, enabling organisations to identify AI agents and tools operating within their environments, 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 are executed.
Continuous AI validation identifies new risks across model updates and policy fine-tuning while generating audit-ready evidence to support security and compliance reviews. Automated red-teaming covers 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 can also enforce customisable policies across text, images, video, audio and AI-generated code to prevent 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 while operating them confidently at enterprise scale.”
According to Gartner, the market for securing AI ecosystems and AI agents is expected to grow from $2.8 billion in 2026 to $16.4 billion by 2030. Fortinet believes the 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. The 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, Fortinet said the expanded capabilities will help organisations secure AI systems throughout their lifecycle.
Financial terms of the transaction were not disclosed, with Fortinet stating that the consideration paid is immaterial to its business.
