Palo Alto Networks has announced its intent to acquire Portkey, an AI gateway provider it says will become the AI Gateway for its Prisma AIRS offering, as organisations move from AI copilots toward autonomous agents.
The company said the shift to autonomous agents is widening an “AI security gap”, describing agents as highly privileged actors that can execute automated decisions across internal and external systems. Under the proposed deal, Portkey would provide a centralised control plane intended to help monitor, route and secure AI transactions across an enterprise.
Lee Klarich, Chief Product & Technology Officer of Palo Alto Networks
“As autonomous agents join the enterprise workforce, they also become a new, unmanaged attack surface. By integrating Portkey into Prisma AIRS, organisations will be able to confidently deploy and govern AI agents. With Portkey, we are providing enterprises with visibility into all their agentic traffic, and enabling them to control and protect against agentic threats.”
Palo Alto Networks said Portkey is already processing “trillions of tokens per month” and is designed for low-latency agent-to-agent communication. The company positioned the acquisition as part of an effort to consolidate controls for security and governance as AI workloads move into production environments.
In the announcement, Palo Alto Networks said the integration is intended to support runtime inspection of AI traffic and enforcement of security and governance policies; apply least-privilege controls to agent interactions; and provide reliability features such as semantic routing, automated failovers, and audit logs. It also outlined centralised artefact management for versioning and access control across models and agents, as well as measures aimed at controlling usage and cost through caching and quotas.
Rohit Agarwal, CEO and Co-Founder of Portkey
“Scaling AI in production requires a delicate balance between total flexibility for developers and absolute control for security teams. By joining Palo Alto Networks, we will establish the AI Gateway as the foundational layer of the secure AI enterprise. Together, we will provide the infrastructure that allows every organisation to deploy autonomous agents with the confidence that their data and operations are fully protected.”
Palo Alto Networks said it will continue to support existing and new Portkey customers after the transaction closes, and that customers would be able to access tighter integration with Prisma AIRS. The deal is subject to customary closing conditions and is expected to close in Palo Alto Networks’ fourth quarter of fiscal 2026.
