Fortinet buys Virtue AI to boost AI security tools
Fri, 21st Aug 2026 (Today)
Fortinet has acquired AI security company Virtue AI, adding AI validation and runtime protection tools to its security portfolio.
Financial terms were not disclosed. Fortinet said the amount paid was immaterial to its business.
The deal targets a growing area of cybersecurity as companies deploy more AI applications and autonomous agents across their operations. The threat surface now extends beyond networks, endpoints, and cloud workloads to prompts, models, agents, Model Context Protocol tools, application programming interface calls, and AI infrastructure.
Virtue AI focuses on securing AI systems during development and in live use. Its tools include automated testing of autonomous agents, monitoring of agent behaviour, scanning of AI tools and source code for hidden risks, and controls designed to block malicious tool calls before execution.
Fortinet plans to fold the business into its AI-focused security offering, including FortiAIGate, which it introduced earlier to protect large language models against threats such as prompt injection, data leakage, model poisoning, and excessive resource consumption.
Wider AI push
Fortinet has been expanding its position in AI security as customers seek ways to manage risks created by broader use of generative AI and agent-based systems. Adding Virtue AI is intended to extend that coverage across the full AI lifecycle, from model development and testing to live operation.
Among the capabilities Fortinet highlighted was automated red-teaming for agentic systems. The technology tests autonomous agents for exploitable weaknesses across more than 50 sandboxed environments and 14 high-stakes domains, including simulated prompt-injection and Model Context Protocol-based attacks against leading agent frameworks.
Fortinet also highlighted continuous AI validation, which it said can identify new risks after model updates and policy fine-tuning while producing audit-ready evidence for security and compliance reviews. According to the company, the testing runs across hundreds of attack vectors and more than 1,000 risk categories, including multimodal testing covering text, images, video, audio, and AI-generated code.
Another part of the Virtue AI product set is what Fortinet described as real-time guardrails. These controls apply policies to AI inputs and outputs to prevent harmful content, sensitive data, jailbreaks, and vulnerable code from reaching users or downstream systems.
Market growth
The acquisition comes as analysts forecast rapid expansion in the market for securing AI systems. Fortinet cited Gartner research estimating that the market for securing AI ecosystems and AI agents will grow from USD $2.8 billion in 2026 to USD $16.4 billion by 2030.
The expected growth reflects a broader shift in enterprise technology as organisations move AI from experimentation into production systems. Security vendors are increasingly trying to address not only the infrastructure that supports AI, but also the behaviour of models and agents themselves.
Fortinet already sells products across network, endpoint, cloud, and application security, and has been positioning its AI-Native Security Fabric as a unified platform across those areas. Adding Virtue AI gives the company a more direct presence in AI runtime security and automated validation, two areas drawing attention as businesses hand more tasks to autonomous software agents.
Visibility remains a key issue for customers. Fortinet said Virtue AI can discover unsanctioned AI applications and agents running in an environment, assess Model Context Protocol tools, and monitor agents as they interact with systems and data. Those controls are designed to reduce the risk of AI tools operating outside approved boundaries or exposing sensitive information.
Ken Xie, Founder, Chairman of the Board, and Chief Executive Officer of Fortinet, outlined the rationale for the deal.
"AI is fundamentally changing enterprise computing, and security must evolve just as quickly," Xie said. "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."