Fortinet has acquired Virtue AI, a specialist in AI runtime protection and automated AI validation, in a move to extend continuous security coverage across agentic AI systems throughout their lifecycle.

The acquisition strengthens Fortinet’s AI-Native Security Fabric and builds on its existing FortiAIGate offering, which protects large language models from prompt injection, data leakage and model poisoning. Virtue AI’s technology extends that protection further into agentic systems, covering everything from development through to runtime.

As organisations move from experimenting with generative AI to deploying autonomous agents in production, their attack surface has expanded well beyond traditional networks and endpoints. It now includes prompts, models, agents, Model Context Protocol (MCP) tools, API calls and AI infrastructure itself.

What Virtue AI brings to the table

Virtue AI’s Guardian Agent capabilities add several layers of protection to Fortinet’s portfolio:

• Agentic system red-teaming: Tests autonomous agents across more than 50 sandboxed environments and 14 high-stakes domains, including simulated prompt-injection and MCP-based attacks.
• Agent protection and governance: Discovers unsanctioned AI applications and agents, scans MCP tools and source code for hidden risks, and blocks malicious tool calls before they execute.
• Continuous AI validation: Runs automated red-teaming across hundreds of attack vectors and more than 1,000 risk categories, generating audit-ready evidence for compliance reviews.
• Real-time guardrails: Enforces customisable policies across text, images, video, audio and AI-generated code to block harmful content and vulnerable code before it reaches users.

“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.”

A fast-growing market for securing AI

Fortinet pointed to Gartner projections that the market for securing AI ecosystems and AI agents is expected to grow from US$2.8 billion in 2026 to US$16.4 billion by 2030, underscoring the scale of demand the acquisition is targeting.

Combined with FortiAIGate and FortiGuard Labs threat intelligence, Fortinet said the addition of Virtue AI’s automated validation and real-time protection is intended to give organisations the confidence to secure AI systems throughout their lifecycle. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed, with Fortinet describing the consideration paid as immaterial to its business.