Fortinet has acquired Virtue AI, a company focused on AI runtime protection and automated AI validation, as it moves to expand its portfolio for securing AI systems used in enterprise environments.
Fortinet said the deal supports its “Security for AI” strategy and its aim to secure what it calls the “agentic enterprise”, where organisations deploy AI applications and autonomous agents at scale. Financial terms were not disclosed, with Fortinet stating the amount paid was immaterial to its business.
The company said the acquisition is intended to extend protections beyond conventional attack surfaces such as networks, endpoints, applications and cloud workloads, to include prompts, models, agents, Model Context Protocol (MCP) tools, API calls and AI infrastructure.
Fortinet earlier introduced FortiAIGate, positioned as a safeguard for large language models against risks such as prompt injection, data leakage, model poisoning and excessive resource consumption. It said Virtue AI’s technology will broaden coverage to AI models, applications and agentic systems from development through runtime.
Fortinet listed Virtue AI’s capabilities as including agentic system red-teaming across “more than 50 sandboxed environments” and “14 high-stakes domains”, as well as tools for governance and visibility over AI agents and applications, continuous validation across model updates and policy fine-tuning, and real-time guardrails intended to enforce policies across text, images, video, audio and AI-generated code.
Ken Xie, Founder, Chairman of the Board, and Chief Executive Officer of Fortinet, said, “AI is fundamentally changing enterprise computing, and security must evolve just as quickly. 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.”
The announcement comes as vendors across the security sector race to address emerging risks associated with AI model deployment and AI agents, including concerns around governance, validation and runtime controls. Fortinet cited a Gartner forecast 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.
