Fortinet has acquired Virtue AI, a cybersecurity company specializing in AI runtime protection, automated validation, and security for autonomous AI systems, as it expands its strategy for securing enterprise artificial intelligence deployments. The acquisition strengthens Fortinet’s existing Security for AI portfolio and adds capabilities designed to protect AI models, applications, agents, and related infrastructure throughout development and production environments. Financial terms were not disclosed, with Fortinet stating that the consideration paid is immaterial to its overall business.
Expanding Fortinet’s AI Security Strategy
The deal comes as businesses increasingly deploy generative AI applications and autonomous agents across enterprise workflows, creating new categories of security risks beyond traditional networks, endpoints, cloud systems, and applications. Modern AI environments can expose organizations through prompts, models, agents, Model Context Protocol tools, API calls, and underlying AI infrastructure, requiring security teams to monitor how these systems interact and behave. Fortinet is positioning the Virtue AI acquisition as part of a broader effort to provide continuous protection and governance as AI adoption moves deeper into production environments.
Earlier in 2026, Fortinet introduced FortiAIGate, a security platform designed to protect large language models against threats such as prompt injection, data leakage, model poisoning, and excessive resource consumption. Virtue AI extends those capabilities by adding automated security testing, real-time safeguards, and monitoring tools for AI applications and agentic systems. Together, the technologies are intended to help organizations identify vulnerabilities before deployment while also controlling potentially harmful behavior once AI systems are operating.
Virtue AI Adds Automated Testing and Agent Protection
Virtue AI’s technology includes automated red-teaming tools that test autonomous agents for exploitable weaknesses across sandboxed environments and a range of high-risk use cases. Its platform can simulate attacks involving prompt injection and MCP-based vulnerabilities while assessing agent frameworks for security weaknesses before they are widely deployed. The company also provides continuous validation capabilities designed to detect new risks when organizations update models, fine-tune policies, or modify AI applications.
The platform additionally provides visibility and governance tools for identifying AI agents and applications operating within enterprise environments, including systems that have not been formally approved. Security teams can inspect MCP tools and source code for hidden risks, monitor agent behavior, and prevent malicious or unauthorized tool calls from being executed. Virtue AI also applies customizable real-time guardrails across text, images, video, audio, and AI-generated code to reduce exposure to harmful content, sensitive data leakage, jailbreak attempts, and insecure code.
Building Continuous AI Assurance
Fortinet Founder, Chairman, and Chief Executive Officer Ken Xie said the rapid transformation of enterprise computing through AI requires security systems to evolve alongside the technology. He said Virtue AI would support Fortinet’s approach to continuous AI assurance, allowing customers to govern and protect AI systems throughout their lifecycle while deploying them at enterprise scale. The acquisition therefore expands Fortinet’s focus from securing AI infrastructure to monitoring the behavior, safety, and reliability of AI-powered applications and autonomous agents themselves.
Fortinet plans to integrate Virtue AI’s capabilities with its wider AI-native Security Fabric, which already provides protection across networks, cloud environments, endpoints, applications, and AI workloads. Combined with FortiAIGate, coordinated security enforcement, and threat intelligence from FortiGuard Labs, the acquired technology is expected to provide a more unified framework for validating, monitoring, and protecting AI systems. The strategy reflects growing enterprise demand for controls capable of addressing increasingly complex security risks created by autonomous and generative AI technologies.
The acquisition of Virtue AI gives Fortinet additional technology for securing AI applications and autonomous agents as businesses accelerate their adoption of artificial intelligence. By combining automated red-teaming, continuous validation, agent governance, and real-time guardrails with its existing cybersecurity platform, Fortinet is broadening its ability to protect AI systems from development through production. The transaction also reinforces the company’s push to establish AI security as a core component of enterprise cybersecurity infrastructure.