Fortinet launches AI security service for FortiGate

Fortinet has launched the FortiGuard Inline AI Security Service for FortiGate firewalls, extending AI inspection and policy controls across its existing firewall estate.

Delivered from the cloud, the service is aimed at customers that want to monitor and control AI use without adding a separate layer of security infrastructure. It gives organisations visibility into AI activity and applies controls to prompts, responses and related traffic.

The offering builds on FortiAIGate, Fortinet's AI security gateway, which underpins the new service. The company is also incorporating technology from its recent acquisition of Virtue AI into that work.

The launch reflects a broader shift in cyber security as businesses bring generative AI tools and autonomous agents into day-to-day operations. Traditional controls can inspect network traffic and payloads, but they do not typically examine prompts, model outputs or tool calls for risks such as data leakage, malicious prompt injection or unauthorised actions by AI agents.

The cloud-based service lets FortiGate users apply AI-specific controls through infrastructure they already run. For customers with stricter privacy or sovereignty requirements, Fortinet is also offering FortiAIGate as a self-hosted deployment in their own environment.

Fortinet says the service can inspect text, images, audio, video and code as AI interactions take place. It also adds data loss prevention measures designed to detect personally identifiable information and other confidential data before it is exposed through AI tools.

Customers can set permissions and usage limits by organisation, workspace, project or user. Controls include model permissions, budgets, spending thresholds and rate limits, with alerts triggered as spending approaches a set cap and requests blocked when limits are exceeded.

Fortinet is also positioning the product as a way to address so-called shadow AI, where staff use consumer or unsanctioned AI tools outside formal company controls. The service is designed to identify that activity and apply policies to it.

Broader controls

Beyond traffic inspection, the platform is designed to help organisations govern AI use across departments through separate workspaces, logs, roles and permissions, while still giving administrators a central view. It also includes a library of predefined policies covering AI governance, privacy and industry regulations, alongside detailed logs of prompts, outputs and tool calls for audit purposes.

FortiAIGate can also show which AI agents are operating across a business and how they interact with applications, APIs, tools, data and Model Context Protocol servers. That reflects the growing use of autonomous systems that can take actions across software environments with limited human intervention.

Michael Xie, founder, president and Chief Technology Officer at Fortinet, said the company was trying to make AI security easier to adopt through products customers already use.

"Organisations need AI security that can scale with how quickly AI is being adopted across the enterprise. 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," Xie said.

Market pressure

Security vendors are racing to adapt established network and cloud security products for AI-related risks as companies put large language models into customer service, software development, internal search and workflow automation. For many buyers, the challenge is whether to deploy a standalone AI security layer or extend existing controls from firewalls, gateways and data protection systems.

Fortinet's approach is to tie AI inspection and runtime controls into its wider set of network, application, cloud, data, identity and security operations products. That gives the company a route into a large installed base of FortiGate users, while also offering a separate deployment model for organisations that want local control over how AI data and logs are processed.

Will Townsend, chief analyst at LoneStar Advisory & Research, said the strategy could appeal to customers trying to avoid managing several AI governance products at once.

"FortiAIGate takes an elegant approach to a complex problem. 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," Townsend said.