Fortinet Expands AI Security With the FortiGuard Inline AI Security Service

New cloud-delivered service adds AI-powered threat inspection, data protection, and security controls to FortiGate firewalls, with support from FortiAIGate.

Fortinet (NASDAQ: FTNT) has announced the FortiGuard Inline AI Security Service, bringing AI-specific threat inspection and security controls to existing FortiGate customers.

The cloud-delivered service aims to help organisations identify risky AI activity, prevent sensitive data exposure and enforce security policies. It uses FortiAIGate technology to inspect interactions involving large language models (LLMs), AI agents and Model Context Protocol (MCP) tools.

For businesses adopting generative AI and autonomous agents, the announcement addresses a growing security challenge. AI systems increasingly interact with sensitive information, business applications, and automated workflows. Traditional network security controls do not necessarily assess the meaning or risks of AI prompts and responses.

According to Fortinet, customers can enable the new service through their existing FortiGate infrastructure without deploying separate AI security systems. Organisations with stricter privacy, security or data sovereignty requirements can instead deploy FortiAIGate within their own environments.

Fortinet says continued development of FortiAIGate, including technology from its recent acquisition of Virtue AI, supports these capabilities. The platform provides AI guardrails, compliance controls, shadow AI visibility, and monitoring of autonomous agents.

Michael Xie, Founder, President, and Chief Technology Officer, Fortinet, said, “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.”

FortiGuard Inline AI Security Service Adds Cloud-Delivered Protection

The FortiGuard Inline AI Security Service extends AI-specific inspection to FortiGate customers through Fortinet’s existing security infrastructure. Fortinet says the service uses FortiAIGate-based guardrails to examine AI prompts, responses and related data in real time. These controls enforce security, compliance and data protection policies across AI applications, models, agents and MCP tools.

The service also extends beyond traditional data loss prevention (DLP) and shadow AI discovery. Shadow AI refers to AI tools that employees or teams use without formal organisational approval or oversight. Identifying these tools helps security teams understand where AI services interact with corporate information. However, identifying AI usage alone does not reveal whether individual interactions contain malicious instructions or sensitive data.

Fortinet says its new service addresses this gap by inspecting AI interactions and masking sensitive information when required. Customers can use these capabilities without deploying and managing additional AI security infrastructure.

FortiAIGate Inspects AI Applications, Agents and MCP Tools

As organisations move AI into production, LLMs and autonomous agents increasingly interact with business applications and sensitive information. These interactions introduce security risks that traditional network inspection may not fully address. Conventional security tools commonly inspect IP addresses, signatures, and network payloads. However, AI-specific threats can appear within prompts, model responses, and MCP tool communications.

Such threats may trigger harmful tool calls, unauthorised API activity, or unwanted autonomous agent actions. Fortinet positions FortiAIGate as a real-time control point between AI applications and models. The platform analyses interactions and applies policies based on the model, application, user role, and business context. According to Fortinet, organisations can use FortiAIGate for several security and governance functions.

Detect AI Threats and Prevent Sensitive Data Exposure

FortiAIGate applies multiple security controls across AI prompts, model responses, MCP tool calls, API activity and autonomous agent actions. Fortinet says its inspection capabilities cover text, images, audio, video and code. The company also claims low latency and minimal false positives.

Expanded DLP capabilities detect 35 types of personally identifiable information (PII) and confidential data. Organisations can configure controls to alert, deny or redact sensitive information before exposure.

Manage AI Usage Policies and Spending

FortiAIGate lets administrators set model permissions, budgets, spending limits, and rate limits across the organisation, workspace, project, or individual user level. Administrators receive alerts when spending approaches configured limits, while the platform blocks requests once those limits are exceeded.

Fortinet also says the platform can block malicious prompts and Denial-of-Wallet attacks before they consume tokens or GPU computing resources. Intelligent routing directs requests to AI models based on content, security policy, and cost. According to Fortinet, this capability does not require changes to application architecture.

Apply Consistent AI Governance Across Teams

FortiAIGate supports dedicated workspaces for different teams and business units. Each workspace can maintain its own policies, models, activity logs, roles, and permissions, while centralised management provides visibility and control across the organisation. This approach allows businesses to apply different AI policies while maintaining consistent governance oversight.

Support Compliance and Security Auditing

Fortinet says FortiAIGate includes more than 50 predefined policies covering AI governance frameworks, privacy laws, industry regulations, and security frameworks. Administrators can enable and customise these policies to meet organisational requirements. The platform also provides detailed logs of prompts, outputs, and tool calls to support security reviews and auditing.

Improve Visibility Into Autonomous AI Agents

FortiAIGate provides visibility into AI agents operating across business environments. According to Fortinet, security teams can monitor how these agents interact with enterprise applications, APIs, tools, data, and MCP servers. This visibility helps organisations understand which AI agents operate within their systems and how they access and use business resources.

Maintain Data Sovereignty With Self-Hosted Deployment

Organisations with additional privacy or data sovereignty requirements can deploy FortiAIGate on-premises or within their own cloud environments. Fortinet supports self-hosted deployments using Kubernetes with NVIDIA GPUs. Under this deployment model, prompts, responses, data, and logs remain within the customer’s environment, providing an alternative to cloud-delivered inspection for organisations requiring greater control over AI data processing and storage.

Fortinet Aims to Reduce Enterprise AI Security Complexity

Fortinet is positioning its cloud-delivered service and self-hosted FortiAIGate platform as complementary approaches to AI security. The FortiGuard Inline AI Security Service provides AI inspection through existing FortiGate infrastructure, while FortiAIGate offers a deployment option for organisations with more demanding privacy, performance, and sovereignty requirements. Both approaches aim to reduce the need for separate tools covering AI security, governance, spending controls, and agent visibility.

Will Townsend, Chief Analyst, LoneStar Advisory & Research, said, “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.”

Fortinet says the integration connects AI inspection and runtime security controls with its broader capabilities across networking, applications, cloud, data, identity and security operations.

For organisations expanding AI adoption, the central consideration is how to inspect and govern AI activity without introducing additional operational complexity.

The announcement provides two deployment approaches. However, organisations must still assess which option meets their performance, privacy, regulatory, and data sovereignty requirements.

Additional Resources

Fortinet provides the following resources for organisations evaluating its AI security capabilities:

About Fortinet

Fortinet (NASDAQ: FTNT) is a driving force in the evolution of cybersecurity and the convergence of networking and security. Our mission is to secure people, devices, and data everywhere, and today we deliver cybersecurity everywhere our customers need it with the largest integrated portfolio of over 50 enterprise-grade products. Well over half a million customers trust Fortinet’s solutions, which are among the most deployed, most patented, and most validated in the industry. The Fortinet Training Institute, one of the largest and broadest training programs in the industry, is dedicated to making cybersecurity training and new career opportunities available to everyone. Collaboration with esteemed organisations from both the public and private sectors, including Computer Emergency Response Teams (“CERTS”), government entities, and academia, is a fundamental aspect of Fortinet’s commitment to enhance cyber resilience globally. FortiGuard Labs, Fortinet’s elite threat intelligence and research organisation, develops and utilises leading-edge machine learning and AI technologies to provide customers with timely and consistently top-rated protection and actionable threat intelligence. Learn more at https://www.fortinet.com, the Fortinet Blog, and FortiGuard Labs.