F5 has launched the F5 AI Security Platform, aiming to provide CISOs with visibility, governance, and protection across enterprise AI stacks. The platform includes five security pillars and integrates SurePath AI’s network-based discovery to close the shadow AI visibility gap. It supports deployments from on-premises to public cloud, targeting regulated industries with strict data sovereignty requirements.
The announcement also includes the acquisition of SurePath AI. This is a Colorado-based AI discovery company whose network-based visibility technology identifies both sanctioned and unsanctioned AI usage across the enterprise without requiring direct application integrations.
Shadow AI, the use of unauthorized AI tools that security teams cannot see, is a core problem the new F5 platform targets. SurePath AI deploys passively through network redirects and out-of-band analysis, detecting unauthorized activity and tracing agent tool calls and MCP server connections without touching existing application architectures.
Five pillars covering the full AI security lifecycle
The platform extends F5’s Application Delivery and Security Platform (ADSP) strategy into enterprise AI, supporting on-premises, air-gapped, cloud, and hybrid deployments.
The platform is built around five integrated components. AI Discovery maps every AI application, agent, and MCP tool call, whether approved or not. AI Security Testing stress-tests systems against more than 140,000 attack patterns. AI Governance translates risk tolerances and regulatory requirements into enforceable boundaries for prompts, outputs, and data access. AI Runtime Protection delivers 98.2 percent security efficacy in independent testing. AI Observability provides a complete audit trail across all AI interactions.
These capabilities are of a similar kind to the features F5 has rolled out earlier this year. In March, F5 partnered with Forcepoint on data security posture management combined with runtime AI controls, following the introduction of AI Guardrails and AI Red Team in January 2026. F5 also further developed its AI-first application delivery strategy in recent months. That is to say: we may hear about security solutions offering something AI-related, but with F5, the focus is clearly on AI usage itself being protected. That requires a holistic approach with multiple particularly risky vectors, from governance issues (such as shadow AI) to direct attempts at infiltration such as prompt injections.
Agentic AI adoption outpacing controls
F5’s own research states 98 percent of organizations are preparing for agentic AI, thus essentially universally, but agent adoption is outpacing the controls designed to manage it. Said research also shows 78 percent of organizations now run AI inference themselves, with organizations running an average of seven AI models in production simultaneously. “AI needs boundaries. But the moment you define a boundary, users learn to evade it, attackers learn to exploit it, and agents amplify the risk of both,” said Kunal Anand, Chief Product Officer at F5.