Fortinet Acquires Virtue AI to Strengthen Agentic AI Security

Fortinet  has acquired Virtue AI,  an AI security company specialising in AI runtime protection, automated AI validation and security for autonomous AI systems. The acquisition is intended to strengthen Fortinet’s broader Security for AI strategy and its efforts to secure enterprises adopting agentic AI.

As businesses increasingly deploy AI applications and autonomous agents, their security exposure is expanding beyond traditional networks, endpoints and cloud workloads to include prompts, AI models, agents, Model Context Protocol (MCP) tools, APIs and AI infrastructure. Fortinet said organisations therefore need security measures that can protect AI systems throughout development and production while ensuring they operate as intended.

The acquisition builds on Fortinet’s existing AI security portfolio, including FortiAIGate, which protects large language models against threats such as prompt injection, data leakage, model poisoning and excessive resource consumption.

Virtue AI will extend these capabilities across AI models, applications and agentic systems. Its technology includes automated red-teaming that tests autonomous agents for vulnerabilities across more than 50 sandboxed environments and 14 high-stakes domains, including simulated prompt-injection and MCP-based attacks.

The company’s platform also provides visibility and governance over AI agents and tools, helping organisations identify unauthorised AI applications, scan MCP tools and source code for security risks, monitor agent behaviour and block potentially malicious tool calls.

Virtue AI’s continuous validation capabilities can identify emerging risks following model updates and policy fine-tuning, while generating audit-ready evidence for security and compliance reviews. Its automated testing covers hundreds of attack vectors and more than 1,000 risk categories, including multimodal testing.

The technology also provides real-time guardrails across text, images, video, audio and AI-generated code to help prevent harmful content, sensitive data exposure, jailbreaks and vulnerable code from reaching users or downstream systems.

Ken Xie, Founder, Chairman of the Board and CEO of Fortinet, said the acquisition would support the company’s vision for continuous AI assurance by helping customers govern and protect AI systems throughout their lifecycle and operate them at enterprise scale.

Fortinet said the acquisition complements FortiAIGate and strengthens its AI runtime security capabilities through Virtue AI’s automated validation and real-time protection. Combined with Fortinet’s security enforcement and FortiGuard Labs threat intelligence, the company expects the expanded portfolio to provide protection for AI systems throughout their lifecycle.

Gartner estimates that the market for securing AI ecosystems and AI agents could grow from $2.8 billion in 2026 to $16.4 billion by 2030, highlighting the growing demand for technologies designed to secure enterprise AI deployments.

Financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed, although Fortinet said the consideration paid was immaterial to its business.