F5 Recognized as Market Shaper in Gartner’s AI Application Security Quadrant

F5 says Gartner’s September 2026 assessment places the company among two vendors in the Market Shapers quadrant

F5 has announced that Gartner has placed the company in the Market Shapers quadrant of its September 2026 Emerging Market Quadrant for AI Application Security. F5 said it is one of only two vendors included in this quadrant.

Gartner evaluates vendors in the Emerging Market Quadrant for AI Application Security across two primary dimensions: their potential to disrupt the market and their potential to execute.

John Maddison, Chief Marketing Officer at F5, said the way enterprises deploy artificial intelligence is creating new security requirements.

“Enterprises are not running AI in a lab. They are running it inside regulated networks, behind APIs, and across agents that authenticate and act on their own,” said Maddison.

He said organizations need to move beyond fragmented security products as AI adoption expands across enterprise environments.

“More than 40 vendors are competing to secure enterprise AI, and most are solving one slice of the problem. In our view, F5’s positioning in the Market Shapers quadrant offers confirmation of a straightforward conviction: security leaders cannot govern what they cannot see, and AI cannot be secured from the outside in. F5 secures AI where enterprises actually run it.”

AI Adoption Is Expanding the Security Surface

Enterprise AI deployments are introducing new security considerations as applications, autonomous agents, APIs and data become increasingly interconnected.

F5's 2026 State of Application Strategy Report found that 88% of organizations have experienced at least one AI-related operational or security challenge, while 98% are preparing for agentic AI.

F5 said protecting these environments requires organizations to consider more than the AI model itself. Security also needs to extend to applications, AI agents, MCP servers, APIs and the information those systems can access.

The company identified four areas it believes are important for securing AI applications:

• Centralized security management across different AI workflows and environments.
• Controls for AI agents, including intent-aware access management and continuous runtime monitoring.
• Adversarial testing connected with runtime protection, allowing security findings to be translated into production controls.
• Air-gapped deployment capabilities for highly regulated environments where data sovereignty and isolation are essential.

F5 Focuses on Security at the Point Where AI Traffic Operates

F5 said its AI security strategy builds on its existing application and API security capabilities.

The company's approach is based on the idea that AI interactions ultimately pass through application and network infrastructure. This includes model requests, agent activity and connections involving MCP servers.

F5 said this position allows it to bring together AI discovery, governance, testing, runtime protection and observability rather than treating each capability as a separate security function.

The company said these capabilities can be deployed across hybrid multicloud, on-premises, private cloud and public cloud environments, including infrastructure requiring air-gapped deployments and specific data-residency controls.

F5 Highlights AI Guardrails and AI Red Team

F5 also highlighted performance and capabilities from its AI security portfolio.

According to the company, F5 AI Guardrails achieved up to 98.4% security efficacy in independent testing. The technology is designed to apply security controls inline during AI interactions rather than relying solely on inspection after an interaction has taken place.

F5 said its AI Red Team capability can test AI systems against more than 140,000 attack patterns contained within its AI threat database.

The company said the results identified through these tests can then be incorporated into runtime security protections.

F5 also said its network-level visibility can help security teams identify AI activity involving models, agents and MCP connections, including shadow AI, without requiring individual application integrations or code modifications.

Enterprise AI Security Enters a New Phase

F5 believes the AI application security market will increasingly require technologies capable of operating across large-scale enterprise and regulated environments.

“The AI application security market is going to consolidate around vendors who can operate at enterprise scale, in regulated environments, with real traffic and real consequences,” said Maddison.