F5 Unveils AI Security Platform to Uncover & Secure Shadow AI

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F5 has launched the F5 AI Security Platform, offering enterprise leaders ongoing insight, management, and defense for AI applications, models, agents, and associated APIs.

SurePath AI: Enhancing AI visibility

The integration of SurePath AI enables the F5 AI Security Platform to detect AI usage across enterprise networks, including shadow AI, without requiring direct application integrations. Through network redirects and out-of-band analysis, SurePath AI offers security teams a unified visibility layer that identifies unauthorized AI activity, categorizes workflow intent, and tracks agent tool calls and MCP server connections.

Kunal Anand, F5’s Chief Product Officer, emphasized that current AI security measures often lack depth, stating, “Enterprises operate AI within regulated networks, behind APIs, and across agents that authenticate and act independently. The F5 AI Security Platform provides CISOs with continuous oversight of every model, agent, and API, regardless of deployment, leveraging the same platform that has secured enterprise applications for three decades.”

Continuous protection framework

The F5 AI Security Platform mitigates AI risks through four core components and an overarching observability layer, establishing a persistent security lifecycle rather than a one-time compliance task.

AI governance

Translating risk thresholds, privacy mandates, and regulatory requirements into enforceable limits for AI prompts, outputs, tool usage, and data access.

AI discovery

Providing real-time visibility into all AI applications, agents, and MCP tool calls, regardless of authorization status. The platform classifies activities by use case and intent, offering insight into both what is running and its purpose.

AI security testing

Evaluating AI systems against over 140,000 attack patterns from the industry’s most comprehensive AI threat database prior to deployment, converting findings into actionable defenses.

AI runtime protection

Implementing guardrails defined in plain language and deployed at interaction points, achieving up to 98.2% security effectiveness in independent tests by blocking prompt injection, excessive agent autonomy, and data leakage.

AI observability

Maintaining a complete audit trail for all AI interactions, ensuring accountability and traceability required by regulated sectors.

The platform combines AI security capabilities with flexible deployment options, supporting on-premises, air-gapped, private cloud, hybrid, and public cloud environments. This is particularly beneficial for CISOs in heavily regulated industries with strict data residency and sovereignty demands.

SurePath AI’s lightweight network-based deployment model further enhances flexibility, requiring no modifications to existing application architectures.

As AI agents become more prevalent, visibility into their operations is critical. F5’s 2026 SOAS Report indicates that 98% of organizations are preparing for agentic AI, yet the pace of adoption outstrips existing control mechanisms. When agents can authenticate, access data, and execute actions autonomously, a single misconfiguration or exploit can escalate risks exponentially.