Fortinet is acquiring Virtue AI in a move to bolster its “security for AI” strategy and focus on providing cybersecurity platforms for enterprise customers through its FortiGate offerings.
Virtue AI offers its Guardian Agent platform to support cybersecurity needs from development through runtime, including AI runtime protection, automated AI validation, and security for autonomous AI systems. That platform offers agentic system red-teaming; agent protection, governance, and visibility; continuous AI validation; and real-time guardrails.
Those services will be injected into Fortinet’s FortiAIGate platform that is currently targeted at protecting large language models (LLMs) from prompt injections, data leakage, model poisoning, and excessive resource consumption. “Combined with coordinated enforcement and FortiGuard Labs threat intelligence, it will give organizations the confidence to secure AI systems throughout their life cycle,” Fortinet noted on the new combination.
“AI is fundamentally changing enterprise computing, and security must evolve just as quickly,” Fortinet CEO Ken Xie added in a statement. “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.”
Financial terms of the transaction were not disclosed, with Fortinet adding that the mysterious amount “is immaterial to Fortinet’s business.”
Fortinet earlier this year inserted a handful of AI-focused updates into its broader FortiOS security operations (SecOps) platform. This included its FortiView real-time visibility tool for tracking shadow AI use in the enterprise; new AI-aware app control for allowing approved generative AI tools while preventing risky actions which can expose sensitive data; operability for model context protocol (MCP) and agent-to-agent (A2A) agentic standards; improved data loss prevention (DLP) with optical character recognition (OCR); and various AI agents spanning the Fortinet Security Fabric.