Fortinet Strengthens AI Security with Virtue AI Acquisition

KUALA LUMPUR, Aug 28 — Fortinet, the global cybersecurity leader, has announced the acquisition of Virtue AI, an innovator in AI runtime protection and automated validation. The move enhances Fortinet’s AI-Native Security Fabric, extending continuous agentic AI validation and runtime protection across the AI lifecycle.

As enterprises rapidly deploy AI applications and autonomous agents, their attack surface now includes prompts, models, agents, Model Context Protocol (MCP) tools, APIs, and AI infrastructure. Fortinet aims to secure these environments with confidence, ensuring AI systems behave as intended.

Earlier this year, Fortinet introduced FortiAIGate to safeguard large language models (LLMs) from prompt injections, data leakage, model poisoning, and other AI-specific risks.

Virtue AI

Virtue AI complements this by providing Guardian Agent capabilities, including agentic system red-teaming across 50 sandboxed environments, governance and visibility of AI tools, continuous validation across 1,000 risk categories, and real-time guardrails for multimodal content.

“AI is fundamentally changing enterprise computing, and security must evolve just as quickly,” said Ken Xie, Fortinet’s Founder and CEO. “Virtue AI’s technology will advance our vision for continuous AI assurance, helping customers govern and protect AI systems throughout their lifecycle.”

According to Gartner®, the market for securing AI ecosystems is projected to grow from $2.8 billion in 2026 to $16.4 billion by 2030. Fortinet believes this reflects rising demand for AI security solutions. Financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed, though Fortinet confirmed the amount was immaterial to its business.

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