To us, the recognition underscores F5’s ability to secure AI across cloud, on-premises, and air-gapped environments at enterprise scale
F5 , the global leader in delivering and securing every app and API, announced it has been positioned by Gartner® in the Market Shapers quadrant of the September 2026 Emerging Market Quadrant for AI Application Security—one of only two vendors to be recognized in that position.[1]
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According to Gartner, vendors evaluated in the Emerging Market Quadrant for AI Application Security are assessed across two axes: potential for market disruption and potential to execute.
“Enterprises are not running AI in a lab. They are running it inside regulated networks, behind APIs, and across agents that authenticate and act on their own,” said John Maddison, Chief Marketing Officer at F5. “Enterprises cannot assemble a security posture from dozens of disparate point products. More than 40 vendors are competing to secure enterprise AI, and most are solving one slice of the problem. In our view, F5’s positioning in the Market Shapers quadrant offers confirmation of a straightforward conviction: security leaders cannot govern what they cannot see, and AI cannot be secured from the outside in. F5 secures AI where enterprises actually run it.”
Securing AI where enterprises run it
Enterprise AI has inverted the traditional security model. Today’s AI systems operate with greater access, autonomy, and speed than human users are capable of, and the pace of adoption is outrunning the controls meant to govern it. F5’s 2026 State of Application Strategy Report found that 88% of organizations have already encountered at least one AI-related operational or security challenge, and 98% are preparing for agentic AI.
Meeting these challenges takes more than a collection of point products. AI application security spans the models and applications themselves, the agents that act on their behalf, the MCP servers and APIs that connect them, and the data they can reach. Securing that expansive surface calls for four essential components:
- A comprehensive platform with centralized management across every AI workflow
- Proven application security capabilities extended into agent-based controls, where intent-aware access control and continuous runtime monitoring govern what an autonomous agent is permitted to do
- Adversarial testing wired directly into automated runtime defenses, so what red teaming uncovers becomes what production enforces
- Secure, air-gapped deployment for regulated sectors where sovereignty is not optional
By bringing these capabilities together, F5 is shaping the AI security market and delivering substantive protections to security leaders. F5’s approach is grounded in the premise that has shaped the company since its founding: security has to live where traffic flows. Every model call, agent action, and MCP connection traverses the network and application layers, where F5 already delivers and secures applications and APIs for the world’s largest banks, carriers, governments, and consumer brands.
That vantage point is what allows F5 to unify governance, discovery, testing, runtime protection, and observability—across generative and agentic AI—into a continuous loop rather than a collection of disparate tools, and to deliver those capabilities across hybrid multicloud, on-premises, air-gapped, private cloud, hybrid, and public cloud environments, including those where data residency and sovereignty are non-negotiable.
It also shows up in measured performance. F5 AI Guardrails demonstrated up to 98.4% security efficacy in independent testing, enforcing protections inline at the point of interaction rather than inspecting after the fact. F5 AI Red Team stress-tests AI systems against more than 140,000 attack patterns drawn from the industry’s deepest AI threat database and converts what it finds directly into enforceable runtime defenses. And because F5 discovers AI activity at the network layer, security teams gain visibility into every model, agent, and MCP call—including shadow AI—without a single application integration or code change.
“The AI application security market is going to consolidate around vendors who can operate at enterprise scale, in regulated environments, with real traffic and real consequences,” Maddison added. “F5’s 30 years of experience in these demanding environments gives our customers the foundation to confidently and securely build for the future with AI.”
Customer demand for F5’s AI security solutions is growing as the gap between AI adoption and AI control widens. In its third quarter fiscal year 2026 earnings results, F5 reported that the number of customers purchasing F5 solutions for AI security doubled quarter-over-quarter.
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