F5 Networks Explained: How BIG-IP Improves Application Security, Performance, and Load Balancing

F5 Recognized as a Market Shaper in AI Application Security
 

F5 has been recognized as one of only two Market Shapers in Gartner’s September 2026 Emerging Market Quadrant for AI Application Security. This recognition highlights F5’s commitment to advancing AI security through discovery, governance, testing, runtime protection, and automated remediation for enterprise AI applications.

F5 Advances Enterprise AI Security

F5 delivers an integrated AI Security Platform designed to help enterprises discover AI usage, identify security risks, enforce guardrails, and automate remediation across generative and agentic AI environments.

F5 Recognized as a Market Shaper in AI Application Security

In Gartner’s Emerging Market Quadrant for AI Application Security, we believe F5’s placement reflects a comprehensive approach to AI security. That approach spans discovery, testing, governance, and runtime protection across the entire enterprise AI deployment lifecycle. F5 was rated highly on both market disruption and the ability to execute at enterprise scale.

How the F5 AI Security Platform Closes the Loop from Discovery to Runtime Protection

This past year marked a pivotal expansion of F5’s AI security strategy. With the introduction of the F5 AI Security Platform, continuous AI governance, AI discovery, AI security testing, AI runtime protection, and AI observability now work together in a single adaptive loop. The platform covers generative and agentic AI alike, so enterprises are not forced to manage separate tools for each stage. Through the acquisition of SurePath AI, F5 also added network-based discovery and intent classification, which helps surface risky AI usage across the entire workforce. Every finding becomes a control, and every control gets tested as the threat landscape evolves. The result is a closed loop that is rapidly customized to each customer’s unique business, security, and regulatory demands. For security teams, that means less guesswork, faster response, and a clearer view of where AI is running and how it is being used.

From Weeks to Minutes: How F5 AI Red Team, AI Guardrails, and AI Remediate Work as One Closed Loop

AI-enabled and agentic attackers now hold the speed advantage, and slow, manual security processes can no longer keep up. F5 addresses this with three solutions that work together as one closed loop. F5 AI Red Team finds the gaps in your AI applications and agents. F5 AI Guardrails then enforces controls against those gaps at runtime. F5 AI Remediate automates the handoff between the two, so findings do not sit in a backlog waiting for someone to act on them. In operation, this turns a weeks-long process into a matter of minutes. Every vulnerability discovered becomes an active control, and every control is continuously tested again as new attack techniques appear. We believe this core loop, and how quickly F5 closes it, is a major reason for its placement as a Market Shaper. For enterprises, it means AI security that moves at the same speed as AI adoption.

Air-Gapped AI Security: Protect Your Critical AI Workloads Entirely Within Your Own Environment

For customers with exceptionally low risk appetites, F5 AI Guardrails and F5 AI Red Team can run in fully air-gapped deployments. They execute locally, with no outbound calls to F5 or to any third-party cloud service. Customers get the same controls and policy model wherever the workload lives.

Why Deployment Freedom Matters in AI Security: Meeting Data Residency and Digital Sovereignty Demands Anywhere Your AI Runs

Where AI runs matters as much as what it does. For more than 30 years, F5 has served the largest financial institutions, healthcare systems, service providers, and government agencies in the world, and across every technology shift one lesson has held true: customers need freedom in how and where they deploy. F5 built its AI security capabilities for that reality from Day One. The F5 AI Security Platform tests and protects critical workloads entirely within customer-controlled environments, whether that is on-premises, in the cloud, or in a hybrid setup. Customers get the same controls and the same policy model wherever the workload lives, with no need to rebuild their security approach for each environment. For organizations navigating data residency and digital sovereignty requirements, this is often the very first question asked, and the one that ends most evaluations early. With F5, it is a question that already has an answer.

Ready for Agentic AI: Securing Agents That Hold Their Own Identities, Call Other Agents, and Act Without a Human in the Loop

The AI security market is young, but it is tasked with addressing the critical challenges every enterprise faces. The challenge is no longer limited to traditional AI applications. Today, agents hold their own identities, call other agents, and act without a human in the loop, which creates entirely new kinds of traffic and risk that older security models were never designed to handle. Securing that traffic is the work in front of every enterprise, and it requires visibility, testing, and runtime enforcement that cover both generative and agentic AI. F5 keeps a continual posture of experimentation and innovation to stay ahead of where the market is headed. By combining AI discovery, red teaming, guardrails, and observability in one platform, F5 helps enterprises adopt agentic AI with confidence instead of hesitation. As agents become a normal part of business operations, security needs to be built in from the start, not added later.