The new cloud-delivered service extends AI inspection and security guardrails to FortiGate firewalls, while continued FortiAIGate development expands controls for AI usage, compliance, data protection and agent visibility.
Fortinet has introduced the FortiGuard Inline AI Security Service. The cloud-delivered offering brings AI-specific inspection and security guardrails to FortiGate customers, helping organizations gain greater visibility into AI activities and address AI-related threats and sensitive data exposure through their existing Fortinet infrastructure.
The service is supported by continued innovation in FortiAIGate, which provides advanced AI guardrails, broader access and compliance controls, visibility into shadow AI and AI agents, and technology gained through Fortinet’s recent acquisition of Virtue AI.
Fortinet’s extensive FortiGate deployment base provides organizations with an accessible way to adopt advanced AI security using infrastructure they already operate. Customers can activate the FortiGuard Inline AI Security Service without deploying or maintaining separate AI security infrastructure, making these capabilities available to a wider range of organizations.
For businesses with stricter security, privacy and data sovereignty requirements, FortiAIGate can also be deployed directly within their own environments, giving them greater control over where and how AI traffic and data are processed.
“Organizations need AI security that can scale with how quickly AI is being adopted across the enterprise,” said Michael Xie, Founder, President, and Chief Technology Officer at Fortinet. “By extending advanced AI inspection and guardrails through FortiGate, we are making AI security available through the infrastructure customers already use. FortiAIGate provides the foundation for this broader strategy, giving customers flexibility in how they deploy and consume AI security based on their cost, performance, privacy, and sovereignty requirements.”
Cloud-Delivered AI Protection Through Existing Fortinet Infrastructure
The FortiGuard Inline AI Security Service enables FortiGate customers to improve visibility into AI usage and address AI-specific threats and sensitive data exposure through their existing infrastructure.
Using FortiAIGate-based guardrails, the service inspects prompts and data in real time and applies security, compliance and data protection policies to interactions involving AI agents, large language models (LLMs) and Model Context Protocol (MCP) tools.
The offering builds on Fortinet’s existing capabilities for identifying shadow AI usage and applying data loss prevention (DLP) policies to AI traffic. It extends these protections by examining the content of AI interactions and masking sensitive information, without requiring organizations to introduce additional infrastructure to deploy and manage.
Context-Aware Security for AI Applications and Agents
As organizations move AI into production, LLMs and autonomous agents increasingly interact with sensitive information, business applications and critical workflows. Conventional security tools typically examine IP addresses, signatures and payloads, but do not specifically evaluate prompts and responses for AI-related threats.
Potential risks can be embedded in prompts, model responses and MCP tool communications. These interactions may trigger harmful tool calls, API requests or autonomous agent actions.
FortiAIGate provides a real-time control point between AI applications and models. It analyzes interactions and applies policies according to the model, application, user role and business context.
Key capabilities include:
- Real-time protection against AI attacks and data leaks: Multilayered guardrails inspect prompts, model responses, MCP tool calls and responses, API activity and agent actions. Dynamic inspection supports text, images, audio, video and code, with a focus on low latency and minimizing false positives. Expanded DLP capabilities detect 35 types of personally identifiable information (PII) and confidential data, allowing organizations to alert, deny or redact sensitive information before it is exposed.
- AI usage governance and spending controls: Organizations can configure model permissions, budgets, spending thresholds and rate limits by organization, workspace, project or user. Administrators receive alerts as spending approaches configured limits, while requests can be blocked when those limits are exceeded. The platform can also block malicious prompts and Denial-of-Wallet attacks before they consume tokens or GPU computing resources. Intelligent routing directs requests to suitable models based on content, policy and cost without requiring application re-architecture.
- Centralized governance across teams: Dedicated workspaces allow individual teams and business units to maintain their own policies, models, logs, roles and permissions while remaining under centralized organizational oversight.
- Compliance and audit support: More than 50 predefined policies can be enabled with a single click. These policies cover AI governance frameworks, data privacy laws, industry regulations and security frameworks. Organizations can customize policies and provide auditors with detailed records of prompts, outputs and tool calls.
- Visibility into AI agents: Organizations can identify AI agents operating across the business and understand how they interact with enterprise applications, APIs, tools, data and MCP servers.
- Deployment flexibility and data sovereignty: FortiAIGate can be self-hosted on-premises or in an organization’s cloud environment using Kubernetes and NVIDIA GPUs. Prompts, responses, data and logs remain within the organization’s environment.
Fortinet Aims to Reduce Enterprise AI Security Complexity
Across its cloud-delivered and self-hosted options, Fortinet aims to provide a more unified way to secure AI while reducing reliance on disconnected security tools and the operational complexity associated with managing them separately.
“FortiAIGate takes an elegant approach to a complex problem,” said Will Townsend, Chief Analyst at LoneStar Advisory & Research. “Rather than asking customers to manage separate tools for AI security, governance, cost, and agent visibility, Fortinet is bringing these capabilities together in a single gateway. The rapid integration of Virtue AI technology further strengthens that story by improving the guardrails and performance customers need as they move AI into production.”
FortiAIGate and the FortiGuard Inline AI Security Service bring AI inspection and runtime controls together with Fortinet’s broader capabilities across networking, applications, cloud, data, identity and security operations.
This combined approach is designed to help organizations manage AI-related risks across users, applications, models, agents and infrastructure while addressing requirements related to performance, privacy, regulatory compliance and data sovereignty.