Fortinet adds AI inspection capabilities to FortiGate

Fortinet has announced a cloud-delivered security service designed to bring AI-specific inspection and threat-blocking capabilities to the company’s next-generation firewall FortiGate.

The FortiGuard Inline AI Security Service seeks to provide organisations with deeper visibility into AI activity, as well as the ability to stop threats and data exposure through the solutions they already use. To augment the service, Fortinet has implemented technology acquired through its purchase in August of AI runtime protection company Virtue AI, as well as recently added capabilities of its FortiAIGate AI runtime security platform.

Models, permissions and other components can be controlled per workspace, project or user, and customers can apply multilayered AI guardrails across prompts, model responses and other components. The platform also provides the ability for each team and unit within the business to set their own policies, models, logs, roles and permissions.

Fortinet said customers can enable the cloud-delivered service without deploying and managing separate AI security infrastructure, but those with more complex security, privacy and sovereignty requirements can deploy FortiAIGate directly in their own environments to achieve greater control into how and where AI traffic and data are processed.

With AI moving into production, LLMs and autonomous agents gain access to sensitive data, business applications and critical workflows. Traditional security tools inspect IPs, signatures and payloads, but they do not assess prompts and responses for potential threats. AI-specific threats hide in prompts, model responses and MCP tool communications, and can trigger harmful tool calls, API calls and autonomous agent actions. FortiAIGate addresses these risks by providing a real-time control point between AI applications and models, analysing interactions and enforcing policy in real time based on the model, application, user role and business context.

Fortinet President and CTO Michael Xie said today’s organisations need AI security that can keep up with the pace 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,” he said. “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.”

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