Fortinet’s Virtue AI acquisition rebalances the agentic AI security equation

Fortinet Inc. announced its intent to acquire Virtue AI Inc. Monday, and though the financial aspects are interesting, what’s more significant is how this will help businesses with their next big security challenge: How do you secure agentic artificial intelligence? Generative AI has raised new concerns about data leakage, unsanctioned use and inaccurate outputs. Agentic AI raises the security stakes because it’s significantly harder to secure, and the impact of breaches is greater. These systems can retrieve information, call application programming interfaces, trigger workflows, interact with applications and increasingly act on behalf of people. That makes an AI agent less like a “chatbot” and more like a digital employee with access credentials, permissions and the ability to affect business processes. The industry’s response cannot be limited to securing the model or filtering prompts. Organizations need to secure the full lifecycle of autonomous AI: what…