Expand Strategic Collaboration to Secure the AI Enterprise

The transition from generative AI to agentic AI represents one of the most significant shifts in the history of enterprise technology. As organizations move from simple chatbots to autonomous agents that can execute business processes, the attack surface isn't just changing, it's exploding.

At Google Cloud Next 2026 in Las Vegas, Palo Alto Networks is proud to announce a series of groundbreaking integrations with Google Cloud. These innovations are designed to do more than just monitor the new AI-driven landscape; they are built to secure it by design. AI deployment is currently outpacing AI governance. By embedding our security platform into Google Cloud’s infrastructure, we are giving today’s enterprises the foundation to become the autonomous organizations of tomorrow.

Here is a look at the four major milestones of our partnership being unveiled this week.

Secure AI Agents with Google Cloud + Prisma AIRS

As autonomous AI agents become the new enterprise standard, security can no longer be an afterthought; it must be architectural. By integrating Prisma AIRS™ natively with Google Cloud Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform, we provide the proactive defenses required to govern complex agentic workflows. This integration ensures that as you scale your autonomous workforce, your security scales with it, providing comprehensive operational integrity without hindering the speed of innovation.

We are delivering capabilities across three critical pillars:

• Protecting Agent-Specific Runtime Risks: In an agentic ecosystem, the primary risk is unauthorized or a destructive action taken by the AI agents themselves. Prisma AIRS secures the "agent-to-tool" interface, preventing poisoned context from triggering malicious scripts or destructive actions. The solution monitors agent execution in real-time, so agents cannot leak sensitive credentials or tool schemas, maintaining the boundary between agents and their access to enterprise data.
• Securing the GenAI Application Surface: Modern AI applications and agents require a secure-by-design approach. Prisma AIRS AI Runtime Security™ provides prevention of more than 30 adversarial prompt injection and jailbreak techniques, as well as malicious code and URLs within LLM outputs. Prisma AIRS utilizes over 1,000 predefined patterns out of the box and ML-powered Enterprise DLP to stop sensitive data leakage.
• Enforcing Enterprise AI Safety and Grounding: Trust in AI is built on the consistency and safety of its output. Prisma AIRS allows organizations to define safety policies in natural language and filter toxic content across eight distinct categories to protect brand reputation. Using contextual grounding, Prisma AIRS can prevent misleading outputs that contradict internal RAG data, keeping agents tied to real facts.

This integration ensures that as you scale your autonomous workforce, your security posture scales with it, providing operational integrity without hindering the speed of innovation.

Security-as-Code for Prisma AIRS Integration with Application Design Center (ADC)

The traditional bolt-on approach to security is no longer viable in a cloud-first world. Google Cloud’s Application Design Center (ADC) is revolutionizing how applications are built, using an intuitive canvas and natural language via Gemini Code Assist.

Palo Alto Networks is announcing that it will be published as a template within the Application Design Center, providing more capabilities to engineering teams:

• Drag-and-Drop Security – Visually "snap" VM-Series firewalls and Prisma AIRS AI protections directly into network flows.
• AI-Driven Architecture – Use natural language prompts to generate secure-by-default, multiregion architectures.
• Simultaneous Deployment – Deploy entire application stacks and security services in a single, unified workflow, ensuring protection is present from the very first minute of deployment.

Zero-Day Protection at Scale with Advanced Malware Sandboxing for Google Cloud NGFW Enterprise

The battle against malware has shifted to the cloud. Modern attacks are faster, more evasive and capable of bypassing traditional defenses.

That is why we are excited to announce Advanced WildFire^®, powered by Palo Alto Networks, natively integrated into Google Cloud NGFW Enterprise, delivering AI-driven malware prevention directly within Google Cloud environments.

This integration embeds inline sandboxing and real-time threat intelligence directly into Google Cloud’s distributed firewall to stop advanced and unknown threats before they impact workloads, enabling:

• Secure Detonation – Suspicious files are safely executed in a controlled sandbox environment to uncover hidden and unknown threats.
• Inline Traffic Inspection – Inbound and outbound traffic is analyzed in real time to prevent lateral movement of malicious payloads across cloud environments.
• AI-Driven Threat Prevention – Leverages global threat intelligence by Palo Alto Networks to block zero-day threats before they compromise workloads.

With Advanced WildFire embedded directly into Google Cloud NGFW Enterprise, organizations can extend consistent protection across their cloud infrastructure while maintaining operational simplicity.

Cloud NGFW Enterprise Advanced Malware Sandboxing will be available in Public Preview soon.

Defining the Future with the Google Cloud Marketplace

Palo Alto Networks has joined the Google Cloud Marketplace Agent-as-a-Service as a launch partner to introduce the Prisma AIRS Model Security agent. Operating as an Agent-as-a-Service, this solution scans AI models for vulnerabilities and policy noncompliance before they reach production.

Available in the Agent Gallery inside Gemini Enterprise, this marketplace offering runs entirely within the customer’s own Google Cloud environment, providing both new and existing Prisma AIRS users a seamless and simple deployment experience inside Gemini Enterprise.

Securing AI Innovation at Scale

The collaboration between Palo Alto Networks and Google Cloud is built on a shared vision: Security should be an accelerator for innovation, not a bottleneck. As we look toward the future of the AI-powered enterprise, our commitment remains to provide the most robust, platform-driven security for every workload, every agent and every interaction.

Want to see these integrations in action? Contact your Palo Alto Networks representative to learn more about how we are securing the future of the cloud together. If you’re attending Google Cloud Next 2026, join us at these sponsored sessions:

• Wednesday, April 22 @ 12:30 PM - 1:15 PM
  The AI-Ready Enterprise: Securing Access and Data in an AI-first World
• Thursday, April 23 @ 9:15 AM - 10:00 AM
  Securing and managing Agentic AI at scale: What Google and Palo Alto Networks are building together
  Munish Khetrapal, vice president of Cloud Engagement, GCP - Palo Alto Networks
  Mike Buratowski, deputy chief information security officer - The Home Depot
  
• Thursday, April 23 @ 9:15 AM - 10:00 AM
  The agentic era: Governing an invisible AI workforce
• Thursday, April 23 @ 12:00 PM - 12:45 PM
  The AI Attack Surface: Strategizing Defense for the modern AI-Powered Enterprise

The post Palo Alto Networks and Google Cloud appeared first on Palo Alto Networks Blog.

The Pivot to Large-Scale Intelligence

For decades, Telecommunications Service Providers have been the central nervous system of the global economy, tasked with a singular, critical mission: connecting people.

The industry spent vast amounts of capital building networks that moved voice, then text and finally high-speed mobile data. We succeeded. According to GSMA's most recent report, there are 5.8 billion unique subscriptions. The world is connected.

But the mission is changing fast. We are no longer just moving data; we are now expected to host intelligence.

Today’s enterprises are drowning in data and desperate for AI-led capabilities to analyze and process the information. They are struggling with the immense capital costs, the scarcity of GPUs, and complex data sovereignty regulations that make public cloud options difficult for sensitive workloads.

We are no longer living in the communications age, or the internet age, or the social network era, not even in the generative AI era. We are entering the Agentic Era. In this new era, data is the raw resource, and AI agents and models are the machinery that refines it into value. The infrastructure required to do this – from massive data ingestion to complex training and high-volume real-time inference – is called the "AI Factory.”

And these AI factories are not being designed for human-speed operations, but rather for machine-speed operations.

This creates a generational opportunity for telecommunications service providers (SP). By building new (or transforming existing) data centers and edge locations into AI factories, SPs can offer hosted AI services that are high-performance, low-latency and compliant with regional requirements.

However, building an AI factory isn't just about racking GPUs. It is about realizing that an AI infrastructure presents a fundamentally new threat landscape that legacy security cannot handle. If the SP’s AI factory is compromised (if models are poisoned, identities hijacked, training data exfiltrated) the damage to reputation and national infrastructure is incalculable.

To capture the AI opportunity, service providers need more than computing power; they need a blueprint for a secure AI architecture. At Palo Alto Networks, we view the security of the AI factory as a three-tiered layer cake, requiring holistic, integrated protection from the physical infrastructure up to the AI agents themselves.

The AI Threat Model Is a Structural Shift

For service providers building AI Factories, the challenge is not simply adding another workload to the data center. AI changes the risk equation entirely. It introduces new traffic patterns, new identities and new forms of autonomy that traditional network and core security architectures were never designed to govern.

• Data Gravity Becomes Attack Surface: AI training and inference environments ingest massive volumes of data from distributed enterprise customers, partners and edge environments. This scale creates a new exposure layer. Malicious payloads, embedded model manipulation, and command-and-control traffic can hide within high-throughput AI data flows. Inspection models built for deterministic traffic patterns struggle when confronted with dynamic, AI-driven pipelines.
• Non-Human Identities at Scale: An AI Factory is more than just infrastructure; it will be populated by autonomous agents. These agents retrieve data, call APIs, invoke tools and trigger workflows across networks and cloud environments. They require elevated privileges to function. For service providers, this means managing not just subscriber identities, but fleets of machine identities operating with delegated authority.
• Agentic and Adversarial Threats: Attackers are also operationalizing AI. They probe for weaknesses faster, automate exploitation and increasingly target the AI systems themselves. Prompt injection can redirect an agent’s mission. Data poisoning can subtly degrade model integrity. Rogue agents can be manipulated to access external tools or escalate privileges. These are not traditional perimeter attacks; they are attacks on reasoning, behavior and autonomy.

For service providers offering AI-as-a-Service, the implication is clear: Securing the AI Factory requires more than network defense. It requires real-time governance of models, agents and data flows, ensuring that autonomous systems operate within defined policy boundaries while maintaining performance and scale.

The Foundation — Securing the High-Performance Infrastructure

The base of our cybersecurity stack is the physical and virtual infrastructure of the AI factory itself. This is a high-stakes environment. In a multitenant SP data center, you might have a financial institution fine-tuning a fraud detection model on one rack, and a government agency running inference on satellite imagery on the next. The barriers between these tenants must be absolute.

Foundational cybersecurity has two critical components: perimeter defense and internal segmentation.

The ML-Powered Perimeter

The front door of the AI factory must handle unprecedented throughput while performing deep inspection. Traditional firewalls, relying on static signatures, become bottlenecks and fail to catch novel threats hidden in massive data streams.

Palo Alto Networks addresses this with our flagship ML-Led Next-Generation Firewalls (NGFW). We have embedded machine learning directly into the core of the firewall. Instead of waiting for a patient zero to be identified and a signature created, our NGFWs analyze traffic patterns in real-time to identify and block unknown threats instantly. For an SP, this means you can provide the massive bandwidth required for AI data ingestion without compromising on security inspection at the edge.

Zero Trust Segmentation Inside the Factory

The perimeter is just the start. Once inside the data center, the biggest risk is the lateral movement threats and malware. If an attacker compromises a low-security tenant or a peripheral IoT device, they must not be able to jump to the sensitive GPU clusters or the model storage arrays.

In an AI factory, workloads are highly dynamic and virtualized. We provide robust segmentation across both hardware and software environments. We can enforce granular policies between virtual instances, containers and different stages of the AI pipeline (e.g., isolating training environments from inference operations). This allows a breach in one segment to be contained instantly, protecting the integrity of the entire factory.

The Engine – Securing AI Agents, Apps and Identities

The middle layer of the security stack is where the actual "work" of AI happens – the models, the LLMs, the agents. This is the newest frontier of cybersecurity and where traditional tools are most deficient.

This layer faces two distinct challenges: Protecting the integrity of the AI interaction and managing the identities of the nonhuman actors.

Securing AI Apps and Agents

As enterprises evolve from standalone LLMs to agentic AI systems that reason, call tools, access data, and take action across workflows, the challenge is no longer just what a model says; it is what an AI agent does.

How do you validate that an LLM powering your AI factory does not expose sensitive information, and that autonomous agents cannot be manipulated through jailbreak prompts, tool injection or malicious instructions? How do you prevent an AI agent from accessing unauthorized systems, escalating privileges, or executing unintended actions?

This is the role of Prisma^® AIRS – our security and governance platform for AI agents, apps, models and data. Prisma AIRS operates directly in the execution path of AI applications and autonomous agents. It enforces policy in real time, validates agent behavior, and blocks prompt injection, model manipulation and agent hijacking before they can impact the business.

Beyond filtering outputs, Prisma AIRS governs agent communications, tool access and data flows to prevent credential leakage, mission drift and unauthorized actions. For service providers delivering AI-as-a-Service, or enterprises deploying AI agents internally, Prisma AIRS enables integrity, compliance and continuous control as intelligent systems move from experimentation into mission-critical operations.

Built in alignment with emerging standards like the OWASP Agentic Top 10 Survival Guide, Prisma AIRS operationalizes best practices to defend against real-world agentic threats.

Governing Nonhuman Identity

Perhaps the most profound shift in the AI factory is who or what is doing the work. We are rapidly moving toward ecosystems of autonomous AI Agents. These agents need to authenticate to databases, authorize API calls to other services, and access privileged information just like a human employee.

If an attacker steals the credentials of a high-privilege AI agent, they own the factory.

This is why the Palo Alto Networks acquisition of CyberArk, the global leader in Identity Security, is so strategic for the AI era. CyberArk specializes in protecting privileged access, and crucially managing nonhuman identities. By integrating CyberArk’s capabilities, we can ensure that every AI agent operating within the SP’s factory is robustly authenticated, authorized for minimum necessary access, and its activities are monitored. We are securing the new digital workforce.

The Overwatch – Holistic, AI-Driven Threat Management

The top layer of the stack is about visibility and speed. An AI factory generates a deafening amount of telemetry data from networks, endpoints, clouds and identity systems. No human security operations center (SOC) can sift through this noise manually to find a sophisticated attack.

To fight AI-driven threats, you need AI-driven defense.

This is the role of Cortex^®, our flagship platform for holistic threat management. Cortex is designed to ingest billions of data points from across the entire Palo Alto Networks product portfolio and hundreds of types of third-party equipment, normalizing it into a single source of truth.

Cortex applies advanced AI and machine learning to this vast data lake to detect anomalies that signal a complex attack spanning different threat vectors. It might correlate an unusual login event from an AI agent (detected by the identity layer) with a subtle change in outbound traffic patterns at the firewall (layer 1), recognizing it as data exfiltration in progress.

For a Service Provider, Cortex provides the "single pane of glass" view over their entire AI factory operations, allowing them to detect, investigate and automatically respond to threats at machine speed, vastly reducing Mean Time to Respond (MTTR).

Building the Trust Foundation for the Agentic Era

The transition to becoming an AI factory is a necessary evolution for Service Providers seeking growth in the coming decade. Your ability to offer localized, sovereign, high-performance AI services will differentiate you from those who large-scale and cement your role as an indispensable partner to enterprises and governments.

But this opportunity is inextricably linked to trust. Your customers will not move their most sensitive data and IP into your AI factory unless they are certain it is secure against modern threats.

Security cannot be an afterthought bolted onto an AI infrastructure. It must be woven into the fabric of the factory, from the silicon to the software agents. By adopting a layered approach (securing the high-performance infrastructure with ML-led NGFWs, protecting models and identities with Prisma AIRS and CyberArk, while managing the entire landscape with Cortex) Service Providers can build the trusted foundations the AI era demands.

This week we’ll be at Mobile World Congress talking about our security platform for AI Factories, along with five solutions and ecosystem partners. Come see us at in Hall 4, Stand #4D55.

The post Why Service Providers Must Become Secure AI Factories appeared first on Palo Alto Networks Blog.

See the agentic SOC come to life at Cortex^® Symphony 2026, the ultimate SOC event.

Today, the Cortex^® platform takes a massive step toward delivering the perfect union of human expertise and agentic AI across all of security operations. Our latest release embeds immersive, context-aware agentic AI across the platform, from code to cloud to SOC, delivering an agentic-first analyst experience for our customers.

With new Cortex AgentiX agents built to tackle more use cases and an expanded AI-ready data foundation, this release slashes response times and redefines what high-efficiency SOC operations look like.

Attack Velocity Has Fundamentally Changed

Not long ago, adversaries took days to move from initial access to impact. Today, they weaponize AI across the attack lifecycle to operate up to 4x faster than just one year ago, executing end-to-end attacks in as little as 72 minutes, according to Unit 42^® research.

These attacks are making manual response obsolete. Teams need the next generation of AI technology that can analyze, decide and act in real time. Our latest innovations, fueled by unified, high-fidelity data, help give defenders the edge they need to outmaneuver modern attacks.

An AI-Ready Data Foundation for the Agentic SOC

Agentic AI depends on data that is fast, flexible and built for scale. Cortex Extended Data Lake (XDL) provides that data foundation for Cortex XSIAM and the broader Cortex platform, serving as a single source of truth for security operations. Built for AI and analytics, it ingests more than 15 PB of telemetry daily across 1,100+ integrations, and is designed to provide the comprehensive data required for effective detection, investigation, and response.

With the introduction of Cortex XDL 2.0, we are revolutionizing how organizations store, access and manage data, enabling new levels of flexibility and control.

New capabilities added with the Cortex XDL 2.0 release:

• Cost-efficient data lake tier that can lower SOC costs with flexible long-term retention for compliance, forensics and investigations.
• Federated search to query distributed data sources without incurring additional ingestion or storage costs.
• Native Chronosphere Telemetry Pipeline integration to filter and route telemetry at the source
• AI-driven parsing that automatically builds production-ready parsers from sample logs using generative AI, removing hours of manual effort and accelerating time to value.

Together, these capabilities power AI agents with critical security signals and give security teams the data they need, when and where they need it, while controlling costs.

Redefining How Analysts Work in the SOC

Cortex introduces an agentic-first analyst experience that embeds advanced AI directly into the analyst’s daily workflow. Designed to reduce investigation time, the elevated experience brings together automatically generated case summaries, visualized issue relationships, and a centralized Resolution Center within a unified case management workspace.

 

AI now spans the Cortex console, allowing context-aware agents to work in real time alongside analysts. Using the Cortex Agentic Assistant, teams can call on agents to plan and execute investigation workflows directly within their cases.

This release also doubles the number of AI agents who are purpose-built for SecOps and Cloud Security. Here are three of the newest additions.

• The Case Investigation agent delivers context-aware assistance that analyzes case artifacts and complex signals to accelerate triage. It recommends next steps, highlights critical evidence, builds AI case summaries, and takes action with analyst oversight.
• The Cloud Posture agent helps teams uncover, triage and resolve misconfigurations and posture risks across cloud environments. It streamlines analyst workflows by proactively prioritizing risk, enriching exposures and applying approved fixes.
• The Automation Engineer agent tackles one of automation’s biggest pain points: Building and maintaining complex workflows. With simple natural language prompts, teams can generate working code and scripts for agents or playbooks.

Our new agentic playbooks bring AI directly into automation workflows, embedding AI tasks that adapt in real time to help teams resolve incidents faster. They automate complex operations, analyze inputs with large language models (LLMs), and produce context-specific outputs.

Matt Bunch, Global CISO, Tyson Foods:

At Tyson Foods, protecting a complex global supply chain in an era of AI-driven threats requires us to move with the same machine speed as our adversaries. By consolidating onto the Palo Alto Networks Cortex platform, we’ve effectively closed the gap between detection and response. The impact has been transformative as we’ve increased our log visibility by 40% while reducing median time to respond by 50%. The agentic capabilities in the platform have allowed our teams to move from manual triage to high-level strategic defense, ensuring our global operations remain resilient and secure.

The Cortex Agentix Platform Has Arrived

The standalone Cortex Agentix platform brings the power of AI to everyone, delivering advanced orchestration and automation for the modern SOC. For Cortex XSOAR^® customers, this marks the natural evolution of our market-leading SOAR platform, now enhanced with agentic intelligence to unlock meaningful productivity gains.

With more than 1,300 playbooks, 1,100 integrations, and built-in MCP support, Cortex Agentix combines over a decade of SOAR leadership with powerful AI capabilities to help security teams operate with greater speed, coordination and efficiency across the SOC.

Securing the Agentic Endpoint

As users increasingly run AI-powered code packages, browser extensions, plugins and more, they are opening the door to a new class of AI-driven threats at the endpoint. That is why we announced our intent to acquire Koi to help secure the emerging agentic endpoint. Once completed, the acquisition will strengthen our visibility and protection at the endpoint, extending our ironclad protection from the SOC to where AI code actually runs.

See the Agentic SOC Take Center Stage at Cortex Symphony 2026

To experience these innovations firsthand, join Lee Klarich, Chief Product and Technology Officer, and Gonen Fink, EVP of Products, alongside other industry leaders at Cortex Symphony 2026, the ultimate SOC event.

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Forward-Looking Statements (unreleased feature only)

This blog contains forward-looking statements that involve risks, uncertainties and assumptions, including, without limitation, statements regarding the benefits, impact, or performance or potential benefits, impact or performance of our products and technologies or future products and technologies. Any unreleased services or features (and any services or features not generally available to customers) referenced in this or other press releases or public statements are not currently available (or are not yet generally available to customers) and may not be delivered when expected or at all. Customers who purchase Palo Alto Networks applications should make their purchase decisions based on services and features currently generally available.

The post The SOC Is Now Agentic — Introducing the Next Evolution of Cortex appeared first on Palo Alto Networks Blog.

Traditional Security Is Blind to the Agentic Endpoint

Modern endpoints are no longer defined only by executables. Increasingly, endpoint behavior is shaped by non-binary software, such as code packages, browser extensions, IDE plugins, scripts, local servers (including MCP), containers and model artifacts. They are installed directly by employees and developers without centralized oversight. Because these components are not classic binaries, they often fall outside the visibility and control of traditional endpoint security tooling.

AI agents compound this problem. They are legitimate tools that operate with the user’s credentials and permissions, enabling them to read, write, move data and take privileged actions across systems. When compromised or misused, agents become the “ultimate insider.” They can autonomously discover, invoke and even install additional components at machine speed, accelerating risk across an already expanding, largely unmanaged software layer.

Weaponizing Trusted Automation

This is not a future concern. The recent viral emergence of OpenClaw serves as a cautionary tale for the agentic era. Developed by a single individual in just one week, it rapidly secured millions of downloads while gaining broad permissions across users' emails, filesystems and shells. Within days, researchers identified 135,000 exposed instances and more than 800 malicious skills in its marketplace, underscoring how a single unvetted agent can create an immediate, global attack surface.

OpenClaw is not an outlier. Recent research highlights how quickly this risk is materializing:

• Vibe Coding Threats: An AI extension in VS Code was found leaking code from 1.5 million developers. This tool could read any open file and send it back to the developer, collect mass files without user interaction, and track users with commercial analytics SDKs.
• Malicious MCP Server: Koi documented the first malicious Model Context Protocol (MCP) server in the wild. When developers added a specific skill to tools like Claude Code or Cursor, it silently forwarded every email to the plugin creator. What’s more, this capability was added later, after developers had already started using it.

Compounding this risk is the fact that autonomous agent actions are often difficult to trace or reconstruct, leaving Security Operations Centers (SOCs) without the visibility they need when an incident occurs.

A New Category of Protection

Complete endpoint security for the rapidly expanding risk of agentic AI calls for a new category of protection: Agentic Endpoint Security. That’s why we announced our intent to acquire Koi, a pioneer in this space. Koi is designed to eliminate blind spots across the AI-native ecosystem and help organizations govern agentic tools safely.

Its technology rests on three core pillars:

1. See All AI Software – Gain complete visibility into the AI tools, agents and non-binary software running in your environment.
2. Understand Risks – Continuously analyze and understand the intent and risk level of all software and AI agents.
3. Control the AI Ecosystem – Enforce policy in real-time to remediate issues and block risky behaviors.

Securing the Agentic Enterprise

We are convinced that Agentic Endpoint Security will soon become a standard requirement for enterprise security. Upon closing the proposed acquisition, we intend to integrate Koi’s capabilities across our platforms to help our customers secure the AI-native workspace.

The wave of AI agents approaching the enterprise cannot be held back. Instead, we must offer secure tools that enable companies to confidently embrace agentic innovation.

Forward-Looking Statements

This blog post contains forward-looking statements that involve risks, uncertainties, and assumptions, including, but not limited to, statements regarding the anticipated benefits and impact of the proposed acquisition of Koi on Palo Alto Networks, Koi and their customers. There are a significant number of factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from statements made in this blog post, including, but not limited to: the effect of the announcement of the proposed acquisition on the parties’ commercial relationships and workforce; the ability to satisfy the conditions to the closing of the acquisition, including the receipt of required regulatory approvals; the ability to consummate the proposed acquisition on a timely basis or at all; significant and/or unanticipated difficulties, liabilities or expenditures relating to proposed transaction, risks related to disruption of management time from ongoing business operations due to the proposed acquisition and the ongoing integration of other recent acquisitions; our ability to effectively operate Koi’s operations and business following the closing, integrate Koi’s business and products into our products following the closing, and realize the anticipated synergies in the transaction in a timely manner or at all; changes in the fair value of our contingent consideration liability associated with acquisitions; developments and changes in general market, political, economic and business conditions; failure of our platformization product offerings; risks associated with managing our growth; risks associated with new product, subscription and support offerings; shifts in priorities or delays in the development or release of new product or subscription or other offerings or the failure to timely develop and achieve market acceptance of new products and subscriptions, as well as existing products, subscriptions and support offerings; failure of our product offerings or business strategies in general; defects, errors, or vulnerabilities in our products, subscriptions or support offerings; our customers’ purchasing decisions and the length of sales cycles; our ability to attract and retain new customers; developments and changes in general market, political, economic, and business conditions; our competition; our ability to acquire and integrate other companies, products, or technologies in a successful manner; our debt repayment obligations; and our share repurchase program, which may not be fully consummated or enhance shareholder value, and any share repurchases which could affect the price of our common stock.

Additional risks and uncertainties that could affect our financial results are included under the captions "Risk Factors" and "Management's Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations" in our Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q filed with the SEC on November 20, 2025, which is available on our website at investors.paloaltonetworks.com and on the SEC's website at www.sec.gov. Additional information will also be set forth in other filings that we make with the SEC from time to time. All forward-looking statements in this blog post are based on information available to us as of the date hereof, and we do not assume any obligation to update the forward-looking statements provided to reflect events that occur or circumstances that exist after the date on which they were made.

 

The post Securing the Agentic Endpoint appeared first on Palo Alto Networks Blog.

The New Frontier of Agentic Development: Accelerating Developer Productivity

The world of software development is undergoing a rapid transformation, driven by the rise of AI agents and autonomous tools. Factory is advancing this shift through agent-native development, a new paradigm where developers focus on high-level design and agents, called Droids, handle the execution. Designed to support work across the software development lifecycle, these agents enable a new mode of development, delivering significant gains in speed and productivity, without sacrificing developer control.

As developer workflows increasingly rely on autonomous development agents, the way software is built evolves. This shift introduces important security considerations, such as prompt injection, sensitive data loss, unsafe URL access and malicious code execution, which, if left unaddressed, can undermine the very benefits these agents offer. Accelerating productivity depends not just on deploying agents, but on deploying them securely. This is where Palo Alto Networks, with its purpose-built AI security platform, Prisma^® AIRS™, plays a critical role.

The Productivity Paradox: Where Agents Introduce Risk

Autonomous agents operating across the software development lifecycle accelerate developer productivity, while also introducing a complex, language-driven threat surface that traditional security tools are not equipped to handle. As a result, new risks emerge, such as prompt injection or leaking secrets that extend beyond the visibility and control assumptions of traditional security approaches. Addressing these considerations is essential to preserving the benefits that agentic development provides.

Recognizing this shift, Palo Alto Networks has introduced targeted capabilities to accelerate secure development workflows. These efforts focus on three critical defense areas: preventing prompt injection, blocking sensitive data leaks and enabling robust malicious code detection capabilities, all of which are necessary to secure the full lifecycle of agent-driven systems.

The Solution: Securing Agentic Workflows for Acceleration

The solution is designed to convert security challenges directly into deployment confidence, dramatically accelerating productivity. By natively integrating Prisma AIRS within Factory’s Droid Shield Plus, the platform is able to inspect all large language model (LLM) interactions, including prompts, responses and subsequent tool calls, to enable comprehensive security across each interaction with the agent.

Prisma AIRS is a comprehensive platform designed to provide organizations with the visibility and control needed to safeguard AI agents across any environment. The platform continuously monitors agent behavior in real time to detect and prevent threats unique to agent-driven systems.

How Security Drives Speed

Embedding security natively into the Factory platform enables two crucial outcomes. To start, it delivers a secure, agent-native development experience for every developer, fostering immediate trust in the integrity of the generated code and documentation. This assurance removes friction often associated with AI-powered workflows, which can accelerate enterprise adoption and scaling of the Factory platform across the organization.

When developers can trust the agents and the integrity of the generated code and documentation, they can innovate faster and deploy with greater confidence. Instead of waiting for security reviews or dealing with fragmentation, security is woven seamlessly into the development lifecycle.

The integration follows a clear API Intercept design pattern:

• When a user enters a prompt or initiates work in Factory, Prisma AIRS intercepts the workflow. If a malicious prompt is detected, the platform can add logic to coach or block the user.

• Similarly, after the LLM generates code, Prisma AIRS intercepts the generated content. If secrets are detected, the platform again adds logic to coach or block the result before it reaches Factory or the user.

This real-time inspection of prompts and generated code enables development teams to be protected against threats, such as privilege escalation, prompt injection and malicious code execution, without disrupting developer velocity.

Deploy Bravely

Prisma AIRS 2.0 establishes a unified foundation for scalable and secure AI innovation. By combining Factory’s agent-native development platform with the threat detection capabilities of Palo Alto Networks Prisma AIRS, organizations gain a powerful advantage. Together, this approach helps organizations adopt agentic development with confidence by embedding security directly into the development experience.

For enterprises looking to confidently scale AI automation and realize the immense productivity gains offered by Factory’s Droids, integrating Prisma AIRS is the next step. This combined approach enables teams to "Deploy Bravely." To learn more about this strategic partnership and integration, see our latest integration announcement and review the Droid Shield Plus integration documentation.

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Key Takeaways for Secure Agentic Development

When adopting Factory with Prisma AIRS, enterprises realize immediate benefits that accelerate their AI strategy:

1. Specialized Threat Defense
   Enterprises gain real-time, targeted protection against agent-specific threats, specifically prompt injection attacks and data leaks, which legacy tools cannot address.
2. Native, Seamless Security
   Moving from a fragmented review process to a continuous, automated defense via API Interception, security enables compliance without slowing down development velocity.
3. Deployment Confidence
   The native integration transforms security risks into operational assurance, accelerating the large-scale enterprise adoption and scaling of your Factory agent-native automation initiatives.

The post Prisma AIRS Secures the Power of Factory’s Software Development Agents appeared first on Palo Alto Networks Blog.

If 2025 proved anything, it’s that no one wins alone in cybersecurity. AI-driven threats accelerated, and environments grew more complex while enterprises pushed hard for simplicity, integrated protection and security outcomes that deliver measurable results and meaningful value.

In response, we saw our partners around the globe lean into integration, treat AI as a built-in advantage and use the strength of our ecosystem as a force multiplier. The result: What could have been a disruptive year instead became one defined by growth and learning across our partner community.

Now, those lessons are guiding how Palo Alto Networks plans to partner with even greater precision in 2026. We remain a channel-first company that’s all-in on our ecosystem and united with our partners in a shared purpose to protect our customers’ digital future. But we also intend to double down in several areas in the year ahead, and we’re asking our partners to join us in doing the same.

1. Simplifying Security Through Integration

One message from customers that came through loud and clear in 2025 is that complexity is the enemy of resilience. Many enterprises are grappling with tool sprawl – multiple consoles, disconnected policies and overlapping investments that slow down their teams when speed and agility matter most.

The partners who delivered some of the most transformative results for organizations this year were those who chose integration over complexity and collaboration over siloed tools. With a laser focus on simplifying security, they were able to help customers:

• Consolidate fragmented point tools onto a unified security platform.
• Align visibility across the network, cloud and security operations center (SOC), so teams can respond faster.
• Build architectures with zero trust and AI-powered detection at the core.

We saw this simplifying-security trend through integration across our ecosystem. Partners unified cloud security and detection workflows through Cortex^® Cloud™ and Cortex. Teams modernized network architectures with tighter integration across our platform. We expect this activity to only accelerate in the coming year as our cloud security offerings continue to evolve.

When we innovate together, customers gain stronger defenses and a faster time-to-value. That’s why Palo Alto Networks has invested so heavily in platformization. When you connect our capabilities across network security, cloud security and security operations (wrapping them with your consulting, delivery and managed services) customers can experience something fundamentally better. With fewer gaps and clearer signals, they can build a security posture that’s built for the speed of modern threats.

In 2026, deep integration will remain a cornerstone of how we partner with precision. We’ll continue aligning our portfolio, programs and joint engagement model, so you can build offerings that reduce complexity for customers and create stronger differentiation for your business.

2. Making AI a Built-in Advantage

At Palo Alto Networks, our approach to AI in cybersecurity is straightforward. We believe AI must be embedded, not bolted on. It has to live in the data, analytics and workflows your teams rely on every day. That’s the thinking behind Precision AI^®, and it’s why we built AI capabilities into our platform’s core.

Partners who treated AI as a platform capability rather than a standalone tool delivered some of the strongest outcomes for customers in 2025. They were able to meet customers’ needs and deliver business outcomes in a single, unified approach. They helped organizations:

• Detect and respond to threats faster with AI-assisted analytics.
• Use automation to streamline change, investigation and response workflows.
• Tie AI to tangible outcomes, such as reduced risk, higher productivity and a better user experience.

In 2026, we’ll double down on AI across the platform and invest in the tools, content and enablement you need to bring those capabilities to life. Our focus is on making it easier for you to build AI-powered services that are repeatable and aligned to the outcomes customers expect.

Upcoming program changes reflect that intent. We’ll promote next-generation security as a growth engine and invest in ways that strengthen partner profitability across consulting services, resale, quality delivery, technical support and managed security services.

3. Ensuring Our Ecosystem Can Be a Growth Engine for Everyone

As AI raised the bar for both attackers and defenders in 2025, the partners who leaned into platformization and outcome-driven services were the ones who helped customers stay ahead of the curve. Those successes are now shaping how we strengthen and scale the partner ecosystem in 2026.

Our ecosystem isn’t just a route to market; it’s intended to be an economic engine for everyone involved. This year, many partners grew their business by building practices around our platform and aligning their services with where customers needed the most support: strategy, implementation, optimization, ongoing operations. We saw especially strong momentum from partners’ expansions:

• Consulting and advisory services around zero trust and AI-driven transformation.
• Resale opportunities centered on platform consolidation and next-generation security.
• Quality delivery and technical support that keep deployments reliable and current.
• Managed security services that give customers 24/7 protection and expert oversight.

These achievements reflect the value exchange at the heart of our ecosystem. Palo Alto Networks invests in platformization, AI and enablement, while our partners bring delivery expertise, regional insight and service innovation. Together, we create outcomes neither of us could deliver alone.

In 2026, we plan to build on that momentum and drive even greater partner profitability. Program evolutions will focus on growth across the full lifecycle, from initial design and implementation to long-term operation and optimization. We’re also expanding collaboration with our technology alliances to build new joint offerings and solution plays that the ecosystem can take to market together.

When we combine our platform, your expertise and the capabilities of our Alliance partners, then customers gain more paths to adopt next-generation security with confidence, and you gain more opportunities to develop differentiated, high-value practices.

Keeping Customers at the Center

At the heart of every partner collaboration is the customer, of course. Everything we build, integrate and advance together starts and ends with protecting them. This year, ecosystem alignment delivered measurable impact for our customers across industries. When partners lead with integrated solutions anchored in our platform, organizations saw visible improvements:

• Faster deployment of secure solutions.
• Reduced complexity with unified visibility.
• Greater confidence in defending against today’s AI-driven threats.

We saw this firsthand in joint wins across cloud security transformations, zero trust modernization and AI-assisted threat detection. When our ecosystem moves together, customers can move faster, operate more securely and achieve meaningful outcomes. Customer success is the foundation of everything we do as a partner-led organization, and it will remain our North Star in 2026.

Partnering with Precision in 2026 and Beyond

What we learned and achieved together in 2025 points us toward a clear focus for 2026 to advance ecosystem-led innovation, so we can deliver outcomes that matter most to our customers.

With that mission in mind, we will focus on the following four priorities:

• Deeper Integration – Expanding API partnerships and strengthening interoperability across the platform.
• Co-Innovation – Enabling partners to build solutions tailored to industry needs and use cases.
• Empowered Enablement – Investing in learning, automation and AI capabilities that fuel differentiated, profitable services.
• Simplified Engagement – Streamlining programs and tools, so that partnering with us is faster and more rewarding.

These priorities highlight the real strength of our ecosystem: How platformization, AI and partner expertise come together to enable what we could not build alone.

Finally, to our partners and customers, thank you. Your trust, collaboration and commitment push us to innovate boldly and continuously. As we enter the new year, I’m excited about what we’ll build together. When we align our AI-powered platform, our partner programs and your expertise in delivery, services and managed security, we can deliver something far greater than a set of solutions.

We’re a powerful team that’s not just defending against what’s next; we’re defining the future of cybersecurity. And together, we’re unstoppable.

Partners, join us in shaping the next chapter of secure, AI-powered innovations. Connect with your Channel Business Manager to align on 2026 opportunities, upcoming program updates and ways we can elevate customer outcomes together. Visit the partner portal to learn more.

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Key Takeaways

• Integration beats complexity.
  Unifying technology, data and expertise drove the strongest outcomes in 2025, helping partners reduce risk and accelerate time-to-value for customers.
• AI is a built-in advantage.
  By tapping into AI embedded across our cybersecurity platform, partners can address security and business outcomes simultaneously and deliver repeatable, profitable, AI-powered services.
• The partner ecosystem is a growth engine, and together, we’re unstoppable.
  Our 2026 priorities focus on deeper integration, coinnovation, empowered enablement and simplified engagement that drive partner profitability and stronger customer outcomes.

The post Partnering with Precision in 2026 appeared first on Palo Alto Networks Blog.

Every CIO and CISO we speak with describes the same paradox: AI is now central to their transformation agenda, yet the fastest way to derail that agenda is to lose control of AI. As generative AI, agentic systems and embedded AI features spread across the enterprise, leaders are no longer asking if they need AI security; they’re asking what kind of AI security strategy will actually scale.

Gartner^® has published two recent reports that validate this reality and outline the strategic direction enterprises must take to secure their AI:

• GMs: Win the AI Security Battle With an AI Security Platform (available as a complimentary reprint from Palo Alto Networks).
• AI Vendor Race: Palo Alto Networks Is the Company to Beat in AI Security Platforms, published December 8, 2025.

Why AI Security Is a Platform Game

Point products can plug individual gaps, but they can’t keep up with the speed, complexity and interconnected nature of AI adoption. And more importantly, they struggle to deliver the trust, consistency or scale AI transformation requires.

Many organizations are already experiencing AI adoption outpacing traditional security tools. Security teams are under pressure on three fronts:

• Risk – Shadow AI, unmanaged agents and custom LLMs create new pathways for data loss, intellectual property exposure and model misuse.
• Cost – Each new AI use case brings yet another tool, driving up license, integration and operations costs.
• Complexity – Fragmented controls across network, data, identity and application stacks create blind spots exactly where AI is moving fastest.

From a CIO or CISO’s perspective, this isn’t just a technical concern but the fault line beneath their entire AI agenda. CIOs are under pressure to deliver productivity gains, cost efficiencies and new AI-powered capabilities faster than ever before.

CISOs, on the other hand, see a parallel reality: custom-built AI applications that may be insecure by default, agents that can act unpredictably, and a constant risk that company secrets or customer data could leak into third-party GenAI tools.

If AI moves forward without security, the enterprise is exposed. If AI slows down because security can’t keep up, the business misses its transformation goals. This is why AI security isn’t a feature; it’s the determining factor in whether AI becomes a competitive advantage or a strategic setback.

Gartner recommends the path forward as “an integrated modular AI security platform (AISP) with a common UI, data model, content inspection engine and consistent policy enforcement.”

Gartner further recommends prioritizing investments in two phases.

Phase 1

Start with AI usage control to secure the consumption of third-party AI services.

Phase 2

Expand into AI application protection to securely develop and run AI applications.

Phase 1: Securing Generative AI Usage Is the “Right Now” Challenge

Before enterprises can secure how AI is developed, they must first understand how it is already being used across the organization. The earliest risks often emerge not from the AI-enabled apps built in-house, but from the external generative AI tools and copilots employees adopt, and often without the IT teams’ knowledge.

That’s why we think the report identifies AI usage control as phase one and why we recommend IT leaders start with these immediate questions to assess their organization’s AI usage.

• Where is AI actually being used in my organization?
• Which tools, copilots and agents are in play, and on what data?
• How do I enable productivity without losing control?

Phase 2: Securing AI Development Early Into the AI Lifecycle

Once public generative AI use is understood, the harder challenge emerges: Securing the AI apps and tools that your organization creates for itself. As models, agents and pipelines move into production, the questions shift from visibility to integrity, safety and scale.

Key questions that organizations must answer in phase two include:

• What AI applications, models and agents are my teams building, and where do they live?
• How do I manage the integrity, safety and compliance of AI apps before they reach production?
• How do I protect models and AI applications from prompt injection, misuse or agentic threats?
• How do I scale AI innovation without creating security bottlenecks for developers?

Palo Alto Networks Delivers the AI Security Platform

Although organizations can separate the work around securing AI usage and AI development, they are not two separate problems. The same organization that needs visibility into employees using public GenAI apps also needs to protect the AI applications and agents they’ve built as they move into production. A platform approach is what allows shared policies, shared guardrails and shared context across both sides of the AI usage and development equation.

That is exactly the philosophy behind our Secure AI by Design approach:

• Secure how GenAI is used with Prisma^® Browser and Prisma SASE to discover AI tools in use, govern access and prevent sensitive data from flowing into public models, all while keeping users productive with GenAI and enterprise copilots.
• Secure how AI is built with capabilities of Prisma AIRS, such as model and agent security, AI security posture management, runtime protection, automated testing with AI Red Teaming, as well as coverage for agentic protocols, like MCP, securing custom AI applications, agents and pipelines.

Gartner identifies Palo Alto Networks as “the company to beat” in their newly released report as of December 8, 2025: “AI Vendor Race: Palo Alto Networks Is the Company to Beat in AI Security Platforms.”

We believe we are the AI Security Platform to beat because:

• Palo Alto Networks product portfolio across network, edge, cloud and data provides a strong foundation for AI usage visibility and control.
• The acquisition of Protect AI integrated industry-leading AI talent and products resulting in the recently announced Prisma AIRS 2.0, which delivers comprehensive end-to-end AI security, seamlessly connecting deep AI agent and model inspection in development with real-time agent defense at production runtime. The platform, continuously validated by autonomous AI red teaming, secures all interactions between AI models, agents, data and users. This gives enterprises the confidence to discover, assess and protect their entire AI ecosystem, accelerating secure innovation.
• Complementing the platform, Unit 42^®’s deep expertise and Huntr’s bug bounty program, provide security thought leadership that directly improves product effectiveness and threat intelligence. These programs help us continuously uncover new attack patterns, misconfigurations and supply chain risks unique to AI systems, as well as feed those insights directly back into the product roadmap.
• Our large installed base and distribution channels create a flywheel for AI security platform adoption and learning from our customers and partners.

We also believe that underneath the technical requirements is a deeper truth: CIOs and CISOs want to move fast on AI, but they only feel safe doing so with a partner who has the scale, signal and staying power. This is where our breadth, research depth and ecosystem matter.

Leading Responsibly Means Listening, Innovating and Evolving

Being early is an advantage, but staying ahead requires humility and continuous learning. Leading means seeing what comes next, and Gartner’s insights accelerate our own roadmap as we continue to evolve.

• Simplifying the Experience: We are integrating capabilities across Prisma AIRS, Prisma SASE and Prisma Browser to make AI security easier to adopt, operate and scale through Strata Cloud Manager as the single entry point.
• Going Deeper into the AI Engineering Pipeline: We recognize that securing AI must start early in the developing environment and ML pipeline, not just at runtime. Our integrations with AI development tools and code repositories will continue to expand.
• Keeping Pace with a Fast-Moving Market: We are investing in open standards, partnerships and research, so our customers don’t have to chase every point solution that appears. Palo Alto Networks is also a contributing member to OWASP Standards and Threat analysis to help create an industry standard on AI security.
• Working Along Native AI Controls: Cloud providers and AI platforms are adding their own security features. We aim to complement, not replace, those controls, providing unified visibility, advanced protection and consistent policies across a fragmented AI landscape.

For us, being “the company to beat” is not a finish line. It’s a responsibility to listen carefully to customers, adapt as AI evolves, and keep delivering practical, integrated outcomes rather than isolated features.

If you are a GM, CIO, CISO or AI leader trying to make sense of a rapidly crowding AI security landscape, we believe “GMs: Win the AI Security Battle With an AI Security Platform”​​ is essential reading.

In the end, the real race isn’t about features; it’s about who helps enterprises accelerate transformation safely, reduce risk and compete better with AI they can trust.

 

Disclaimer: Gartner does not endorse any company, vendor, product or service depicted in its publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s business and technology insights organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this publication, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

Gartner, AI Vendor Race: Palo Alto Networks is the Company to Beat in AI Security Platforms, By Mark Wah, Neil MacDonald, Marissa Schmidt, Dennis Xu, Evan Zeng, 8 December 2025. 

Gartner, GMs: Win the AI Security Battle With an AI Security Platform, By Neil MacDonald, Tarun Rohilla, 6 October 2025.

GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and is used herein with permission. All rights reserved.

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