Fortinet, the Nasdaq-listed network security company, acquired Virtue AI, a startup that tests and protects AI models, applications and autonomous agents. Fortinet announced the deal in mid-August 2026; SecurityWeek reported the announcement on a Monday, and the press release carried by Zawya was datelined Dubai.
Financial terms were not disclosed. Fortinet said the amount it paid was immaterial to its business.
Fortinet plans to add Virtue AI's technology to its AI-Native Security Fabric, the set of integrated products it sells across networks, endpoints, clouds and applications.
What Virtue AI built
Virtue AI sells a security and governance platform for AI systems. One part runs automated red-teaming, attacking models and applications across hundreds of attack vectors and more than 1,000 risk categories, with multimodal testing and reports for security and compliance teams. SecurityWeek reported that it uses more than 100 proprietary attack algorithms.
For autonomous agents, Virtue AI tests for weaknesses across more than 50 sandboxed environments and 14 high-stakes domains, including simulated prompt-injection and Model Context Protocol (MCP) attacks. It also discovers unsanctioned AI apps and agents, scans MCP tools and source code, monitors agent behaviour and blocks malicious tool calls before they run.
At runtime, its guardrails enforce custom policies across text, images, video, audio and AI-generated code, aiming to stop harmful content, sensitive data, jailbreaks and vulnerable code from reaching users or other systems.
“AI is fundamentally changing enterprise computing, and security must evolve just as quickly.”
Why Fortinet is buying
Fortinet argued that companies deploying AI now have a wider attack surface that includes prompts, models, agents, MCP tools, API calls and AI infrastructure. Earlier in 2026 it launched FortiAIGate, which protects large language models from prompt injection, data leakage, model poisoning and similar risks.
The company said Virtue AI extends that protection from development through production and complements FortiAIGate with automated validation and real-time protection, combined with Fortinet's FortiGuard Labs threat intelligence.
Fortinet cited a July 2026 Gartner forecast that spending on products and tools for securing AI systems and agents will grow from $2.8 billion in 2026 to $16.4 billion by 2030. Founder and chief executive Ken Xie said security must change as quickly as AI is changing enterprise computing.
The founders and the funding
Virtue AI was founded by Bo Li, its chief executive, together with Dawn Song, Carlos Guestrin and Sanmi Koyejo, researchers who together had more than 80 years of work in AI safety and security, according to the company's 2025 funding announcement.
In April 2025 Virtue AI announced $30 million in seed and Series A funding from Lightspeed Venture Partners and Walden Catalyst Ventures, joined by Prosperity7 and existing investors Factory, Osage University Partners, Lip-Bu Tan, Amarjit Gill and Chris Re. At the time it named Uber and Glean as customers.
In that announcement, the company said its red-teaming platform was algorithmic rather than human-led and covered more than 320 risk categories based on regulations and use cases, from hallucination and privacy leakage to jailbreaks and prompt injection. It also claimed its guardrail models were more than 30 times faster than alternatives and worked in over 90 languages. Bo Li said at the time that customers kept running into the same problems: weak evaluation methods, inefficient guardrails and manual processes that slowed AI deployment.
Fortinet did not say how many Virtue AI employees would join or whether the Virtue AI brand would continue.
A busy market for security deals
The deal is one of many in cybersecurity this year. SecurityWeek said it had catalogued more than 240 cybersecurity deals so far in 2026.
Fortinet says well over half a million customers use its products and that it sells more than 50 enterprise products across networking and security. Its existing AI security lineup already included FortiAIGate and the FortiGate Hyperscale Firewall, and the company presented Virtue AI as part of a broader strategy for securing companies that run autonomous AI agents.
