Surprisingly Useful AI Article Enhancements
F5 has introduced the F5 AI Security Platform, designed to give CISOs continuous visibility, governance and protection across enterprise AI applications, models, agents and the APIs connecting them.
Alongside the platform launch, F5 has acquired SurePath AI, a company specialising in network-based AI discovery, intent classification and shadow AI detection. The acquisition forms a core component of the new platform.
The moves come as AI systems increasingly operate with more access, autonomy and speed than even the most over-privileged human users, creating new risks for security teams and business leaders. A prompt injection, data leak or agent acting beyond its authorised scope can expose sensitive information, disrupt operations and erode customer trust.
At the same time, employees are adopting unauthorised tools and unsanctioned integrations, creating shadow AI footprints that most security teams cannot see, let alone govern. According to F5’s 2026 State of Application Strategy (SOAS) Report, 88 per cent of organisations report at least one AI-related operational or security challenge.
Kunal Anand, Chief Product Officer at F5, was blunt in his assessment of the current state of AI security.
“Most AI security today is a wrapper around a chatbot. That is not security,” Anand stated. “Enterprises run AI inside regulated networks, behind APIs, and across agents that authenticate and act on their own. The F5 AI Security Platform gives CISOs and security leaders what they have been missing: continuous control over every model, agent and API, wherever the AI runs, delivered on the same F5 platform that has secured and delivered enterprise applications for three decades.”
Extending The ADSP Strategy
The new platform is designed to extend F5’s Application Delivery and Security Platform (ADSP) strategy to enterprise AI through a continuous, adaptive loop approach to governing, discovering, testing and protecting enterprise AI workloads.
F5 has built the platform to support on-premises, air-gapped, private cloud, hybrid and public cloud environments. This is intended to give organisations greater control over AI security where data residency, sovereignty and operational requirements are non-negotiable.
The company combines AI security capabilities with flexible deployment options, enabling enterprises to operate across a range of environments. This is particularly relevant for CISOs in regulated industries with strict data residency and sovereignty requirements.
SurePath AI Closes The Visibility Gap
The acquisition of SurePath AI powers the platform’s approach to network-based AI discovery, identifying AI usage across the enterprise – including shadow AI – without requiring direct application integrations.
With deployment through network redirects and out-of-band analysis, SurePath AI gives security teams a unified visibility layer that detects unauthorised AI activity, classifies the intent behind each workflow and continuously traces agent tool calls and MCP server connections.
This visibility feeds directly into the F5 AI Security Platform, informing the risks to be tested by F5 AI Red Team and mitigated by F5 AI Guardrails. SurePath AI’s lightweight network-based deployment model requires no changes to existing application architectures.
Four Pillars Of Protection
The F5 AI Security Platform addresses AI risk through four integrated pillars and an overarching observability layer, creating what F5 describes as a persistent security lifecycle rather than a one-time compliance exercise.
AI governance translates specific risk tolerances, privacy requirements and regulatory obligations into enforceable boundaries for AI prompts, outputs, tool use and data access.
AI discovery provides continuous visibility into every AI application, agent and MCP tool call running across the enterprise, whether sanctioned or not. The platform classifies activity by use case and intent, so teams know not just what is running but why. SurePath AI’s network-based discovery does this passively, with no application-level integration required.
Related: Best Business Laptops for work & school
Related: Best Gaming Laptops
Related: Best Portable Laptop
AI security testing stress-tests AI systems against more than 140,000 attack patterns before those systems reach production, converting findings directly into enforceable defences.
AI runtime protection allows teams to define guardrails in plain language and deploy them at the point of interaction. F5 claims the platform has demonstrated up to 98.2 per cent security efficacy in independent testing, blocking prompt injection, excessive agent autonomy and data leakage.
AI observability provides a complete audit trail across every AI interaction on the platform, maintaining the accountability and traceability that regulated industries require.
Agentic AI Adds Urgency
The platform launch reflects growing urgency around the proliferation of AI agents in enterprise environments. F5’s 2026 SOAS Report found that 98 per cent of organisations are preparing for agentic AI, but the speed of agent adoption is outpacing the controls designed to manage it.
When agents can authenticate, call tools, access data and take actions autonomously, the blast radius of a single misconfiguration or exploit grows significantly. The F5 AI Security Platform is positioned as a response to that challenge, extending the company’s existing application security capabilities into the AI domain.
F5 has been delivering application security for three decades and serves organisations across on-premises, cloud, edge and hybrid multicloud environments. More information is available at f5.com.
Last Updated on June 24, 2026 by Nick Ross
