ortinet has acquired Virtue AI, an AI security company specialising in AI runtime protection, automated AI validation and security for autonomous AI systems.
The acquisition is intended to strengthen Fortinet’s broader Security for AI strategy as enterprises increasingly deploy agentic AI and autonomous systems. As AI adoption expands, organisations face new security risks across prompts, models, agents, Model Context Protocol (MCP) tools, APIs and AI infrastructure.
Virtue AI’s technology will extend Fortinet’s existing AI security capabilities through automated red-teaming, continuous validation, agent governance and real-time security guardrails. Its platform can test autonomous agents across more than 50 sandboxed environments and 14 high-stakes domains, while covering hundreds of attack vectors and more than 1,000 risk categories.
The acquisition builds on Fortinet’s existing FortiAIGate platform, which is designed to protect large language models against threats including prompt injection, data leakage, model poisoning and excessive resource consumption.
Virtue AI will also provide visibility into AI agents and tools, scan MCP tools and source code for vulnerabilities, monitor agent behaviour and help block potentially malicious tool calls. Its real-time guardrails cover text, images, video, audio and AI-generated code.
Fortinet said the combined capabilities will strengthen AI runtime security and provide protection across the AI lifecycle, supported by its security enforcement technologies and FortiGuard Labs threat intelligence.
Financial terms were not disclosed, although Fortinet said the consideration paid was immaterial to its business. Gartner estimates that the market for securing AI ecosystems and AI agents could grow from $2.8 billion in 2026 to $16.4 billion by 2030.
