Palo Alto to acquire Portkey to help secure AI agents

Cybersecurity company Palo Alto Networks has arranged to acquire AI gateway company Portkey as part of a plan to establish a mission-critical control plane for autonomous AI agents in the enterprise.

Portkey provides a centralised plane for the management and protection of autonomous AI agents, and is processing trillions of tokens monthly. The company’s mission statement is to ensure that security governance never comes at the expense of developer speed.

Palo Alto Chief Product and Technology Officer Lee Klarich said the company plans to integrate Portkey into its Prisma AI Runtime Security (Prisma ARIS) platform, where it will act as the central nervous system capable of monitoring, routing and securing every AI transaction across an enterprise.

“As autonomous agents join the enterprise workforce, they also become a new, unmanaged attack surface. By integrating Portkey into Prisma AIRS, organisations will be able to confidently deploy and govern AI agents,” Klarich said. “With Portkey, we are providing enterprises with visibility into all their agentic traffic, and enabling them to control and protect against agentic threats.”

As part of Prisma AIRS, Portkey will apply strict least-privilege controls to every agent interaction, ensuring all AI workloads remain secure and compliant. The solution promises to also help organisations improve uptime for autonomous workflows through semantic routing and automated failovers, and achieve global AI governance through centralised artefact management capabilities.

Subject to approvals, the transaction is expected to close during the fourth quarter of 2026.

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