F5 Strengthens AI Security Platform with SurePath AI Acquisition for Enhanced Enterprise Protection

F5 has unveiled the F5 AI Security Platform, a comprehensive solution aimed at providing Chief Information Security Officers (CISOs) with continuous visibility, governance, and protection for enterprise AI applications, models, agents, and their connecting APIs. This announcement is complemented by F5’s acquisition of SurePath AI, a leader in network-based AI discovery, intent classification, and shadow AI detection. This acquisition is pivotal for enhancing the capabilities of the new platform, which is designed to secure enterprise AI deployments effectively.

Expanding the Application Delivery and Security Strategy

The F5 AI Security Platform employs a continuous, adaptive loop approach to govern, discover, test, and protect enterprise AI workloads. This innovative design extends F5’s Application Delivery and Security Platform (ADSP) strategy into the realm of enterprise AI. Recognizing the complexities of AI deployment in large organizations, F5 has engineered the platform to function seamlessly across various environments, including on-premises, air-gapped, private cloud, hybrid, and public cloud settings. This flexibility is crucial for organizations that prioritize data residency, sovereignty, and operational requirements.

AI systems today operate with unprecedented levels of access and autonomy, often surpassing even the most privileged human users. This evolution introduces new security risks for organizations. Incidents such as prompt injections, data leaks, or unauthorized agent actions can lead to the exposure of sensitive information, operational disruptions, and a decline in customer trust.

Addressing Shadow AI and Operational Challenges

The proliferation of unauthorized tools and unsanctioned integrations by employees has led to the emergence of shadow AI footprints, which many security teams struggle to detect and manage. According to F5’s 2026 State of Application Strategy (SOAS) Report, 88% of organizations report facing at least one AI-related operational or security challenge.

Kunal Anand, Chief Product Officer at F5, emphasized the inadequacy of current AI security measures, stating, “Most AI security today is a wrapper around a chatbot. That is not security. 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.”

SurePath AI: Enhancing Visibility and Control

The integration of SurePath AI significantly enhances the F5 AI Security Platform’s capabilities in network-based AI discovery. This technology allows for the identification of AI usage across the enterprise, including shadow AI, without necessitating direct application integrations. Through frictionless deployment via network redirects and out-of-band analysis, SurePath AI provides security teams with a unified visibility layer. This layer detects unauthorized AI activities, classifies the intent behind workflows, and continuously monitors agent tool calls and server connections.

This visibility is crucial for informing risk assessments conducted by the F5 AI Red Team and for implementing mitigations through F5 AI Guardrails.

A Comprehensive Security Lifecycle

The F5 AI Security Platform is structured around four integrated pillars, supported by an overarching observability layer that fosters a persistent security lifecycle rather than a one-time compliance effort. Key features include:

• AI Governance: Establishes enforceable boundaries for AI prompts, outputs, tool usage, and data access based on specific risk tolerances, privacy requirements, and regulatory obligations.

• AI Discovery: Provides continuous visibility into every AI application, agent, and tool call across the enterprise, classifying activities by use case and intent. SurePath AI’s network-based discovery operates passively, eliminating the need for application-level integration.

• AI Security Testing: Conducts stress tests on AI systems against over 140,000 attack patterns sourced from the industry’s most comprehensive AI threat database prior to production deployment, translating findings into enforceable defenses.

• AI Runtime Protection: Implements guardrails in clear language at the point of interaction, achieving up to 98.2% security efficacy in independent tests by blocking prompt injections, excessive agent autonomy, and data leakage.

• AI Observability: Maintains a complete audit trail of every AI interaction on the platform, ensuring accountability and traceability essential for regulated industries.

Flexible Deployment Across Environments

F5’s new solution uniquely combines AI security capabilities with flexible deployment options, allowing enterprises to operate seamlessly across on-premises, air-gapped, private cloud, hybrid, and public cloud environments. This adaptability is particularly beneficial for CISOs in highly regulated sectors with stringent data residency and sovereignty requirements. The lightweight, network-based deployment model of SurePath AI further enhances this flexibility, requiring no alterations to existing application architectures.

As AI agents become more prevalent, heightened visibility is increasingly critical. The F5 2026 SOAS Report indicates that 98% of organizations are preparing for agentic AI, yet the rapid adoption of these agents is outpacing the controls established to manage them. When agents possess the capability to authenticate, access data, and act autonomously, the potential impact of a single misconfiguration or exploit escalates significantly.

For more information on this development, see the original reporting source: securitymea.com.

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