For the last several months, we have had early, unbounded access to the latest frontier AI models. What we’ve seen from that vantage point has made it clear that the window for organizations to get ahead of what’s coming is shorter than most leaders realize.

We have moved past the era of incremental AI improvements into a threat landscape shift. Our testing has revealed a step-change in capability that demonstrates an intuitive understanding of software vulnerabilities. This is more than faster code generation, it is a shift from AI as an assistant to AI as an autonomous agent capable of discovering and chaining flaws at a scale that most defenders aren’t prepared for.

These capabilities will not stay confined to controlled environments for long. When Mythos first launched, we predicted a six-month window before attackers gained access. We now believe that timeline has accelerated significantly.

To meet this inflection point, defense must operate at the speed of the adversary. That is why Palo Alto Networks has introduced Frontier AI Defense. This initiative unites our AI-native security platforms with Unit 42^® consulting and threat expertise with strategic partners to deliver continuous protection, prioritized risk mitigation and autonomous remediation.

What the Threat Looks Like Now

The latest frontier models, including OpenAI’s GPT-5.5-Cyber, Anthropic’s Mythos and Claude Opus 4.7, and the specialized variants emerging across major labs, represent roughly a 50% improvement in coding efficiency over their predecessors. That number sounds incremental, but in practice, it’s the threshold at which AI crosses from a helpful assistant into an autonomous operator.

Based on our testing and review, we found four key developments that, taken together, redefine the modern threat landscape:

• Vulnerability Discovery at Scale: Frontier AI is exceptionally effective at identifying vulnerabilities across massive, complex codebases. In our testing, three weeks of model-assisted analysis matched a full year of manual penetration testing, with broader coverage.
• Exploit Chaining & Synthesis: What is more consequential than individual discovery is the models’ ability to think like an attacker. They link multiple lower-severity issues into single, critical exploit paths, seeing full-stack logic, including SaaS and public-facing surfaces, in ways traditional scanners cannot.
• Attack Cycle Compression: In AI-assisted scenarios, the time from initial access to exfiltration has collapsed to as little as 25 minutes. Detection and response measured in hours is no longer a viable standard; single-digit MTTR (Mean Time to Respond) is the new floor.
• The Unsupervised Attack Surface: Rapid AI development and decentralized innovation are creating a massive, unsupervised attack surface in real-time. As local AI agents become commonplace, every desktop is now effectively a server, yet most organizations lack visibility into the code their own employees are generating and deploying.

Our Approach

These emerging threats form the foundation of how we have architected our platform response for the agentic era – Frontier AI Defense. Our approach moves beyond traditional, reactive defense to provide a comprehensive framework built to outpace frontier-AI-enabled attackers. This initiative is defined by:

• Advanced Access: We leverage early access to frontier AI models to harden defenses and simulate attacks before they reach the mainstream.
• Intelligence-Led Resilience: Unit 42 experts leverage frontier AI to fast-track discovery and remediation of exposures at machine speed through our Unit 42 Frontier AI Defense service.
• Unified Global Ecosystem: We provide the scale required for global protection through our Frontier AI Alliance of elite partners, including Accenture, Armadin, Deloitte, IBM, NTT DATA, and PwC.
• Machine Speed Security: By natively integrating Frontier AI across our platforms, we deliver the automated, real-time defense necessary to counter autonomous threats.

The Window Is Open. It Won’t Be for Long.

The capabilities we tested under early-access conditions are expected to become widely available over the next several months. Success in this new environment requires adapting your cybersecurity stack before these tools are in the hands of every adversary.

The threat has never been more sophisticated. The window to prepare for this shift is closing. And we're here to help secure your future at the edge of the frontier.

Visit Palo Alto Networks Frontier AI Defense to learn more.

The post A New Era of Security: Frontier AI Defense appeared first on Palo Alto Networks Blog.

Elevating AI Security

Every AI system you deploy is a potential attack surface. Models and agents can carry embedded backdoors, malicious operators or compromised dependencies. Once running, these artifacts can exfiltrate sensitive data or execute unauthorized code, creating persistent vulnerabilities within the enterprise perimeter. Organizations running AI workloads on Nutanix need security that catches these threats before they reach production.

Nutanix and Palo Alto Networks are excited to announce a purpose-built integration between the Nutanix Enterprise AI and Palo Alto Networks Prisma AIRS^® advanced security capabilities, specifically focusing on AI Model Security and AI Red Teaming. This partnership directly addresses the critical need for a secure-by-design approach to AI development, giving customers the confidence to accelerate their AI journey.

Seamless Security Integration on the Nutanix Enterprise AI Platform

The Nutanix Enterprise AI platform provides a unified, scalable and secure foundation for the entire AI lifecycle: from data preparation and model fine-tuning to deployment and management. By integrating cutting-edge AI security tools by Palo Alto Networks directly into this workflow, we enable security checks to become an intrinsic part of the AIOps pipeline.

Scanning AI Models for Comprehensive Vulnerability Detection

The Prisma AIRS AI Model Security solution introduces sophisticated model scanning capabilities that are essential for preemptively identifying and mitigating risks.

• Prisma AIRS Model Security Integration: Automatically scans AI models (e.g., during check-in to a model registry on the Nutanix Enterprise AI platform) for inherent vulnerabilities, policy violations and malicious code. This provides Proactive Risk Mitigation by detecting malicious or vulnerable model artifacts before deployment, helping prevent zero-day exploits and potential data leakage caused by compromised models.
• Dependency Analysis: Examines all open-source libraries and dependencies used in the model environment for known vulnerabilities and license compliance issues. This enables Supply Chain Security, eliminating risks introduced by third-party components throughout the entire AI deployment lifecycle.
• Model Supply Chain Threats: The system addresses malicious model artifacts, including deserialization exploits, embedded backdoors, unsafe file formats, unauthorized code execution, untrusted sources and noncompliant licenses. This enables Model Integrity and Governance by validating model safety, provenance, approved formats, license compliance and detecting hidden execution paths before deployment.

AI Red Teaming Your AI Systems for Adversarial Resilience

AI Model Security addresses known issues, but the malicious actors of tomorrow are developing new ways to exploit AI systems. This is where the power of Prisma AIRS AI Red Teaming by Palo Alto Networks comes into play, creating a crucial layer of proactive testing against adversarial attempts. AI Red Teaming involves simulating sophisticated attacks against the AI application’s behavior to test its resilience under attack.

• Continuous AI assessment: Onboard an LLM model, application and agent, then start scanning in less than 10 minutes. Use documented APIs to integrate into CI/CD pipelines to trigger automated red teaming whenever versions are updated. Connect AI endpoints securely via an outbound web socket channel to eliminate the need for routing changes, while maintaining the option for IP allowlisting, if preferred. Your team controls access. This reduces technical setup overheads and empowers you to keep your assessment current.
• Contextual Vulnerability Insights: Prisma AIRS profiles your LLM model, application or agent and informs the Red Teaming Agent to design relevant attack objectives. The Red Teaming Agent is trained on over 50 techniques and simulates attack prompts to achieve those objectives. This reduces noise and lets you focus on actual business relevant risk.
• Comprehensive Threat Coverage: Prisma AIRS uses a library of over 750 attacks to evaluate your defensibility. Both the library and the red teaming agent are updated and trained on a constant basis to keep up with the AI threat landscape. This stress tests your AI system thoroughly, so your system is defensible to known and unknown threats.

Securing the Future of Enterprise AI — The Nutanix and Palo Alto Networks Integration

This integration between the scalable, high-performing Nutanix Enterprise AI platform and the advanced security intelligence of Palo Alto Networks offers measurable value to AI-driven organizations:

1. Accelerated Time-to-Trust – By automating critical security checks as part of the MLOps process on the Nutanix Enterprise AI platform, teams can deploy models faster, knowing they have been rigorously vetted by a leading security partner.
2. Simplified Compliance and Governance – The joint solution provides a verifiable record of security testing (scanning and red teaming), making it simpler to demonstrate adherence to internal governance standards and external regulatory mandates.
3. End-to-End AI Security Posture – Customers gain a holistic view of security, from the unified AI infrastructure layer managed by Nutanix, to the network security enforced by Palo Alto Networks. This visibility now extends critically into the AI models themselves, completing the security posture by unlocking controlled access to vendor models, so protection is enforced seamlessly.
4. Cost and Resource Efficiency – Integrating security tools within the existing AI platform streamlines workflows. Data Scientists and ML Engineers can trigger red teaming simulations and scanning directly within their familiar Nutanix environments, reducing the need for dedicated, siloed security teams to manually test every model.

The partnership between Nutanix and Palo Alto Networks is a commitment to building a more secure future for enterprise AI. With this integration, you can bring LLM models into your environment without fear. Malicious code and hidden backdoors are blocked before they ever reach you. Your endpoints stay continuously protected, with coverage across over 50 attack techniques and the contextual risks that come with agentic AI. When you're evaluating a model or an endpoint, the risk picture is right there inside NAI – no context-switching, no guesswork. And a custom security dashboard gives you a single place to see where you stand. The result is AI you can actually trust at the core of your lifecycle, so your teams can build faster without trading off security for speed.

Key Takeaways

A "Secure-by-Design" AI Pipeline: The partnership between Nutanix and Palo Alto Networks is a commitment to building a more secure future for enterprise AI. The integration enables advanced level AI security in AIOps workflow. By embedding Prisma AIRS directly into the Nutanix Enterprise AI platform, organizations can automate model scanning and vulnerability detection during the initial check-in phase, authorizing only validated, secure models to reach production.

Proactive Defense via AI Model Security and AI Red Teaming: The solution provides a dual-layer defense: AI Model Security preemptively blocks hidden backdoors, malicious code and supply chain threats in third-party artifacts, while AI Red Teaming uses autonomous agents for contextual discovery to generate new attack scenarios and have over 750 sophisticated adversarial attack scenarios. This enables resilience against both known vulnerabilities and emerging zero-day AI exploits.

Unified Governance and Operational Efficiency: The partnership consolidates security and visibility into a single custom dashboard within the Nutanix environment. This unified view allows Security and AI teams to manage risk while having continuous assessments and compliance records significantly accelerating the time to trust.

Next Steps

For more information, visit the Palo Alto Networks partner directory or contact your local sales representatives to learn more about a trial run.

The post Nutanix and Palo Alto Networks Integrate for Robust Model Trust appeared first on Palo Alto Networks Blog.

Not hours. Not days. It takes thirty-nine seconds from initial access to data exfiltration.

That stat, pulled from Unit 42^® research, isn't hypothetical. It's what defenders are up against right now, while most organizations are still building security teams around manual detection and response workflows that were never designed to operate at machine speed.

Wendi Whitmore, Chief Security Intelligence Officer at Palo Alto Networks, put it plainly in a recent conversation on the Threat Vector podcast, recorded live at RSA this year:

If you're applying a manual detection and response capability, you are going to be beat by the attacker every day.

It's the kind of sentence that should make security budgets move faster.

The Threat Landscape Doesn't Wait for Organizational Consensus

Whitmore has spent nearly 25 years tracking nation-state actors, and she's unequivocal about what's changed. The adversaries today aren't just better funded and more sophisticated. They're faster, and increasingly AI-powered.

Consider what's converging right now:

Chinese nation-state groups like Volt Typhoon and Salt Typhoon have been operating with near-surgical patience inside critical infrastructure, leveraging existing administrative tools to avoid detection. Volt Typhoon is focused on military prepositioning in power grids, water systems and telecommunications. Salt Typhoon has been systematically collecting intelligence from those same networks. Neither group announces itself with novel malware. They disappear into environments using the tools already there.

Meanwhile, threat actors tied to Iran are operating with entirely different objectives: tactical disruption and destruction. And financially motivated cybercriminal groups are automating ransomware campaigns at a pace that has compressed attack timelines from weeks to minutes.

Every CISO is being asked to defend against all of them simultaneously, while also managing their organization's AI expansion, and doing it without adding headcount.

Speed Is the New Perimeter

When Whitmore references the 39-second exfiltration window, she's pointing at something structural, not just alarming. It reflects how completely the attacker's operational tempo has shifted.

The 72-minute data breach figure from Unit 42 Incident Response data is equally striking: From initial access to full data theft in the time it takes to sit through a decent movie. A 400-times year-over-year increase in exfiltration speed isn't a trend. It's a fundamental change in the physics of an attack.

"There is no way that we are going to defeat these adversaries if we are working at manual speed," Whitmore explained. The answer isn't just more analysts. It's fighting AI with AI, letting machines handle the volume and velocity, so humans can focus on the problems that actually require human judgment.

Two Sides of the Same AI Problem

Here's where the conversation gets more nuanced and more important.

Most of the AI-in-security conversation focuses on the offensive side: adversaries using generative AI to craft convincing phishing lures, accelerate reconnaissance and automate attack sequences. That's real, and it's accelerating.

But Whitmore raised the other half of the problem, one that gets far less attention: The attack surface that organizations are creating by deploying AI without securing it.

Innovation of AI doesn't so far outpace the security of AI.

This is the outcome she wants to see. Right now, that's not what's happening. Business pressure to deploy AI quickly is outrunning the security architecture required to protect it. Every new AI deployment touching production data, cloud APIs and enterprise systems expands the attack surface. Shadow AI, prompt injection, model poisoning: These are not future threat vectors. They're present tense.

The distinction Whitmore draws is useful: AI for cybersecurity (faster detection, automated response, reduced analyst burden) needs to advance in parallel with cybersecurity for AI (securing the models, prompts and data pipelines that organizations are building on). One without the other creates exactly the kind of asymmetry attackers will exploit.

Visibility Is Where It Starts

Whether the conversation is about defending against nation-state actors or securing AI deployments, Whitmore keeps returning to the same foundation of visibility.

Not complexity. Not more tools. Visibility is a single, unified view of what's happening across endpoints, networks, cloud and AI systems, that’s fast enough to matter when the window is measured in seconds, not days.

For SOC teams, that means being able to detect and contain a threat before a compromise of one system becomes an enterprise-wide event. For CISOs thinking about AI governance, it means understanding what's being deployed, what's being prompted, and where the data is going before an incident surfaces for them.

The organizations Whitmore sees succeeding aren't the ones with the largest security budgets. They're the ones with the clearest picture of their environment, and the architecture to act on it in real time.

The Win Looks Different Now

Perhaps the most important reframe in the conversation is that the objective is no longer to prevent every attack. That goal is not achievable against adversaries operating at AI speed with nation-state resources.

The win is resilience. Detecting fast and containing fast. Keeping one compromised endpoint from becoming an enterprise-wide breach.

That shift in framing, from prevention to rapid recovery, has significant implications for how security teams are built, how AI is integrated into workflows, and how CISOs make the case for investment to leadership that still thinks in terms of keeping attackers out.

The adversaries already know the perimeter is gone. The question is whether your defense strategy has caught up.

Want to Dig in More?

Listen to the full interview here.

The Unit 42 2026 Global Incident Response Report goes deep on the threat trends shaping how modern attacks unfold. If you want the data behind the headlines, start here. Download the Report →

The post 39 Seconds — That's How Long It Takes to Lose Your Data appeared first on Palo Alto Networks Blog.

Modern phishing campaigns are no longer trying to convince users. They are trying to outrun them. By forcing an automatic progression from click to download, attackers eliminate the moment of hesitation entirely by forcing files to download instantly using trusted cloud platforms like Dropbox and Google Drive.

Detecting when these legitimate SaaS auto-download features are being weaponized is an immense challenge for traditional defenses. This is exactly where Cortex^® Email Security steps in. By combining deep static analysis with advanced behavioral intelligence, the module can distinguish in this attack between a benign file share and a malicious, forced-momentum trigger.

This technical detection is vital because while the autodownload method is the primary cause of infection, its effectiveness relies on a clever strategy, using a wide range of changing social engineering lures. By alternating between lures like 'Invoices' or 'Quotes,' attackers rotate their themes to catch a wider variety of victims. This strategy allows attackers to convert trusted email links into rapid, dangerous file executions that effectively evade standard security measures.

How Forced Momentum Drives Auto-Downloads

The core of this attack leverages the infrastructure of real SaaS providers to eliminate the user's preview buffer. Typically, cloud sharing directs users to a webpage for file examination. In this campaign, however, forced-download parameters (such as ?dl=1 on Dropbox) are used instead. To ensure the victim executes the file once it lands on their machine, attackers hide the danger behind "visual anchors." By using double extensions like PDF and .EXE, the threat actor exploits default settings in certain operating systems that hide known extensions. The user's eyes stop at the familiar ".PDF" or ".ZIP," leading them to believe the file is a harmless document rather than a malicious executable.

When the targeted victim clicks the link in the email, it triggers an immediate file download in the browser, effectively bypassing any intermediary steps.

Attack Flow: From Email to Execution

• The Bait: A highly personalized email arrives, using a trusted cloud link (like Dropbox) to lower the victim's guard.
• The Trap: Clicking the link skips the usual "preview" screen and instantly drops a file onto the victim's computer.
• The Disguise: The file is cleverly named to look like a safe PDF or document, hiding its true identity as a harmful program.
• The Lock: In many cases, the attacker ensures only the intended victim can open the file, preventing security tools from scanning it first.
• The Takeover: Once the victim opens the file, the attacker gains remote access to the system.

The Library of Lures Strategy

To fuel the autodownload machine, attackers employ a flexible strategy by switching between various social engineering themes. This spear phishing campaign targets specific inboxes, such as "Orders," to exploit professional routines. Some common lures found in this campaign include:

• Financial Urgency – Fake "Invoices" or "Receipts" that induce anxiety. These often set close-day payment deadlines, pressuring recipients to click quickly.
• Business Operations – "Quote Requests" or "Purchase Orders" that exploit professional habits.
• Deceptive Naming – Concealing the download as a safe document, using display text like "invoice.pdf" in the email body to hide the underlying Dropbox URL.

Government Domain Impersonation

Attackers often leverage high-authority lures designed to paralyze a user's critical thinking. In one sophisticated wave, we observed threats impersonating a government entity by exploiting the high-reputation, official government domain. By borrowing the reputational authority associated with official infrastructure, the attacker successfully maneuvered an "Unidentified Payment Notice" past standard "Untrusted Sender" filters. To the recipient, the email carries the weight of a sanctioned document. Fearing legal or financial ramifications, they feel a heightened sense of urgency to click "View Invoice" to resolve the issue immediately.

Employee Impersonation

When government authority isn’t the angle, attackers shift to impersonating internal staff. In one case, the sender’s display name was spoofed to match a real employee in the target organization. Attackers rely on a “Momentum of Trust” tied to familiar names to overwhelm user judgment. Even when a generic Gmail address is used, users, especially those on mobile devices, rarely pause to check the underlying headers.

Internal Trust Amplification ("Human Relay")

The most effective aspect of this campaign occurs through Internal Laundering, where the threat shifts from external suspicion to a trusted internal message. This was observed when a Finance Department employee received a "Quote Analysis" file and, believing it to be a valid inquiry, mistakenly forwarded the link to the Procurement department.

At that stage, the attack no longer depended on deception, it propagated through trusted human workflows. These various tactics illustrate the sophistication and adaptability of phishing campaigns and highlight the importance of vigilance in email security.

How We Uncovered a Single Threat Actor

Although the lures appeared diverse, a deeper technical analysis revealed that they were all orchestrated by a single, coordinated threat actor.

By mapping the campaign, we uncovered a significant pattern: Each autodownload link pointed to a different file hash to evade signature detection, but all unique executables were ultimately associated with the same parent installer hash.

The file was identified as a specific Remote Monitoring and Management (RMM) executable, an administrative software used to manage computers remotely. Because RMM tools are legitimate, they often trigger fewer alerts than traditional Trojans. This allows the attacker to maintain persistent access under the guise of “authorized” system activity.

How Cortex Email Security Addresses the Threat

To defend against a campaign that emphasizes speed and rotation, behavioral analysis is essential.

The Cortex^® Email Security Module addresses this threat:

• Advanced URL Analysis – Detection of forced-download parameters, combined with delivery of high-risk files via URLs.
• Deep Metadata Correlation – Correlating sender identity with behavioral anomalies to flag threats that traditional scanners might overlook.
• LLM-Based Intent Analysis – Classifying phishing themes (invoice, payment, quote) despite variation.

The security engine triggers an alert by synthesizing LLM analysis with real-time email telemetry, global threat intelligence and behavioral signals.

Securing the Click

The combination of autodownload links and rotating lures is crafted to exploit user momentum and the "psychology of trust."

This campaign represents a shift from deception to acceleration. Attackers no longer need perfect lures, they only need to remove friction. Defenders must evolve accordingly, focusing not only on what a link is, but on what it forces a user to do.

Palo Alto Networks Cortex Advanced Email Security was built for this evolution. By moving beyond static file analysis to identify the behavioral "red flags" of autodownloads and forced-momentum URLs, we provide the visibility needed to stop these attacks before they reach the device.

The module examines email metadata, content, and behavior to uncover hidden malicious intent and sophisticated impersonation, including AI-crafted threats. By assigning precise risk scores to every detection, the system filters out the noise, allowing analysts to move past alert fatigue and focus on the most critical threats first.

Indicators of compromise discovered during this research are detailed on Unit 42’s GitHib instance.

FAQs

1. Why is the "Auto-Download" parameter so effective? It removes the "moment of doubt." By bypassing the preview page, the attacker forces the file onto the computer instantly, prompting the user to "Open" it out of habit.
2. How does the use of rotating lures benefit the attacker? It maximizes both psychological and technical success. People have different "blind spots" (e.g., finance professionals are likely to click on invoices), and variety increases the chances of finding a template that can bypass specific customers' security filters.
3. Why might a sandbox fail to catch the malicious file? Because the link was "Identity-Bound." To the scanner, the link appeared to lead to a harmless error page (cloaking), resulting in a false negative.

Cloaking involves showing different content to security scanners than what is presented to the victim. By using Identity-Bound access, the file only reveals itself to the intended target.

The post The Dangerous Momentum of Autodownload Phishing appeared first on Palo Alto Networks Blog.

As Frontier AI crosses new thresholds, the landscape for both attackers and defenders is shifting. At Palo Alto Networks, we are committed to ensuring defenders maintain the advantage.

To deliver this critical edge, our Unit 42 Frontier AI Defense will now leverage Anthropic’s Claude Security, powered by Opus 4.7. By integrating one of the world’s most advanced AI models, we are empowering our customers to outpace automated threats. Through Frontier AI Defense, organizations can rapidly assess their security posture, remediate vulnerabilities and harden their infrastructure against next-generation, AI-driven attacks.

We are utilizing Claude Security’s deep technical reasoning to enable our customers to find and fix vulnerabilities with unprecedented speed. This includes:

1. AI-Driven Exposure Analysis – Identifying complex exploit chains that turn minor findings into critical risks.
2. Scalable Application Analysis – Performing deep-stack code reviews at a scale and depth previously unavailable.
3. Agentic Defense – Powering autonomous workflows that detect and remediate threats at machine speed, backed by human oversight.

Palo Alto Networks is also participating in Anthropic's Cyber Verification Program, which credentials security teams for legitimate defensive use of frontier models.

The threat timeline is accelerating. Within months, AI-driven attack capabilities will become a standard fixture of the threat landscape. Palo Alto Networks is dedicated to ensuring our global customers are equipped with the modern frontier AI models necessary to stay secure both today and tomorrow.

The post Enhancing AI-Driven Defense with Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.7 appeared first on Palo Alto Networks Blog.

Frontier AI is changing what is possible for attackers. To meet this escalating threat, Palo Alto Networks is teaming up with Armadin, the new offensive security company founded by Kevin Mandia. This partnership expands our newly introduced Unit 42 Frontier AI Defense service, scaling our ability to identify and remediate AI-driven exposures, and accelerating protection across the enterprise.

Over the past few weeks, we’ve spoken with hundreds of CISOs who universally feel the urgency on the frontlines. Security leaders need to know exactly where they stand against the AI-driven attacks happening right now, and the ones coming in the next six months.

Expanding Frontier AI Defense — The External AI Hyperattack Assessment

For organizations seeking to actively pressure-test their perimeter, this partnership introduces an autonomous, AI-driven offensive assessment of your external attack surface.

This added layer identifies real attack paths and proves exploitability across internet-facing assets. The platform begins with passive discovery, validating publicly exposed assets, cloud resources and secrets. Next, Armadin deploys a coordinated swarm of autonomous AI attack agents, operating at machine speed across your external footprint.

These agents execute active reconnaissance, launch attacks and exploit vulnerabilities in parallel, using over 50,000 templates. Upon initial access, the swarm simulates post-exploitation behavior to demonstrate impact, logging every attack chain as decision-grade evidence of exploitable risk.

Decision-Grade Proof of Exploitable Risk

With this added layer of autonomous simulation, Unit 42 Frontier AI Defense provides an even more rigorous, pressure-tested view of an organization's external attack surface. This allows our experts to accurately simulate the tradecraft of the most capable, AI-equipped threat actors, compressing complex attack lifecycles from days into minutes.

AI may change what is possible for attackers, but in the hands of defenders, it becomes a decisive advantage. This partnership is another important step in making sure that advantage stays with the defenders.

A member of Project Glasswing and OpenAI’s Trusted Access for Cyber (TAC) program, Palo Alto Networks remains the only company equipped to deliver this strategic level of partnership through Unit 42 Frontier AI Defense and the Frontier AI Alliance, driven to integrate cutting-edge technologies into our products and services.

Get started with Unit 42 Frontier AI Defense today.

The post Unit 42 Expands Frontier AI Defense with Armadin Partnership appeared first on Palo Alto Networks Blog.

Palo Alto Networks Completes Acquisition of Portkey

We are pleased to announce that Palo Alto Networks has officially completed the acquisition of Portkey. 

We are moving from vision to reality by integrating Portkey’s pioneering AI Gateway directly into the fabric of the Palo Alto Networks product portfolio. Prisma AIRS AI Gateway will provide a unified vantage point to secure and govern AI agents at scale, offering a mission-critical control plane to identify, authenticate and authorize every agentic interaction in real time.  

We are delivering the industry’s most comprehensive security and unified control framework for the agentic enterprise, enabling our customers to scale autonomous AI workloads with complete confidence.

The era of the AI Enterprise has arrived. Today, 81% of enterprises are piloting the use of AI agents or have fully implemented AI agent solutions. We aren't just talking about smart chatbots. We are talking about autonomous agents that execute.

By leveraging APIs and MCP servers, these agents navigate complex workflows, access sensitive data and make real-time, business-critical decisions. The question is no longer if companies will adopt AI agents, but how to securely operationalize them without putting the brakes on innovation. 

The Challenge: Expanding Attack Surfaces

AI agents are creating a new and largely invisible attack surface. The risk is not just their independence, but the lack of visibility and accountability. Without a centralized enforcement layer for operational and security controls, every team that deploys an agent may unintentionally expose the enterprise to unauthorized data access and heightened security risks.

To solve this, Palo Alto Networks is redefining security for the agentic era. We recently introduced Prisma AIRS 3.0, the industry’s first platform to secure the entire agentic AI lifecycle. Portkey's acquisition accelerates that momentum.

The Prisma AIRS AI Gateway: From Chaos to Control 

Portkey's AI Gateway will be integrated into Prisma AIRS to deliver the unified control plane that enterprises need to operationalise and secure AI apps and agents at scale.

Moving from “chaos to control” requires a centralized approach to governance. Currently, many AI initiatives are hindered by fragmented security and a lack of oversight. The AI Gateway solves this by providing a unified vantage point where organizations can enforce consistent policies across all models and agents, ensuring every interaction is identified, authenticated and authorized in real time within a single governing framework.

The Prisma AIRS AI Gateway will establish a mission-critical control plane for the agentic enterprise, enabling teams to move autonomous workloads from development into at-scale production with confidence. With operational features like a unified API to LLMs, an agent registry, semantic routing and caching, the AI Gateway equips enterprises with complete control in one platform. By serving as a centralized enforcement point at the center of Prisma AIRS for all agent traffic, the AI Gateway will provide critical security functions, including Agent Artifact scanning, automated Red Teaming and Runtime Security needed to monitor behavior, route requests and mitigate risks in real time. Crucially, the AI Gateway will reinforce Agent Identity Security via Idira (formerly CyberArk), applying strict protocols to ensure every autonomous action is authenticated and governed by least-privilege controls.

Our vision is for the Prisma AIRS AI Gateway to serve as the industry blueprint for enterprises in the agentic era. By making security a foundational component of the operational lifecycle, we are empowering enterprises to build and govern an AI ecosystem that is secure by design.

Why Portkey? The Pioneer in AI Gateways

• Battle-Tested: Portkey’s AI Gateway is already supporting the demands of the modern enterprise, at scale, with several Fortune 500 customers, processing trillions of tokens per month with the low latency that is required for agent-to-agent communication. This ensures that agentic security does not come at the cost of developer speed or application performance. 
• Architectural Simplicity: Portkey offers plug-and-play capabilities with just three lines of code required to implement the AI Gateway. The AI Gateway, powered by unified APIs, also provides secure access to over 3,000 LLMs, MCP servers and agents, giving enterprises a flying start to building and executing with AI agents.
• Better Together: Palo Alto Networks and Portkey’s joint vision is to make Prisma AIRS the most ubiquitous platform for AI security. With exceptional AI security by Palo Alto Networks combined with Portkey’s AI Gateway, we will offer a comprehensive AI Security platform.

What’s Next?

The era of AI Enterprises is here. We’re making sure it is secure by design. The complexity of managing agents and securing them has long created friction in enterprises. With the integration of Portkey into Prisma AIRS, we will remove the trade-off between agent autonomy and authority. We are ensuring that as businesses accelerate into the era of autonomous agents, the security architecture isn’t just keeping up, it is setting the pace. 

Learn more about Prisma AIRS - the world’s most comprehensive AI security platform.

Forward-Looking Statements

This blog contains forward-looking statements that involve risks, uncertainties, and assumptions, including, but not limited to, statements regarding the anticipated benefits and impact of the acquisition of Portkey on Palo Alto Networks, Portkey and their customers. There are a significant number of factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from statements made in this blog, including, but not limited to: risks related to disruption of management time from ongoing business operations due to the acquisition and the integration of Portkey and other recent acquisitions; our ability to effectively operate Portkey's operations and business, integrate Portkey’s business and products into our products, 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 February 18, 2026, 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 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.

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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 Google Cloud and Palo Alto Networks Partnership

As AI agents move into business-critical environments, they are transforming everything from security operations to internal workflows. However, scaling these AI applications introduces unprecedented hurdles for security executives, from detecting "shadow AI" and unsanctioned usage to governing complex nonhuman identities across multimodel environments.

To overcome these challenges, organizations need more than just tools; they need a layered architecture built on a foundation of platformization. The long-standing partnership between Palo Alto Networks and Google Cloud provides this essential framework, offering customers:

• Integrated Security Ecosystems: Seamlessly manage the full agent lifecycle with visibility and observability across your entire AI infrastructure.
• Jointly Engineered Solutions: Leverage over 80 co-engineered integrations designed to eliminate the tradeoff between a cloud-native experience and best-in-class security.
• Proven Scale and Performance: Benefit from a partnership that has already delivered impactful, AI-driven solutions to protect joint customers from evolving threats.

Google Cloud Marketplace enables customers to discover, try, buy and use industry-leading applications that have been validated to run on Google Cloud. Palo Alto Networks has closed $2.4 billion in GCP bookings, helping address evolving customer needs, such as simplified procurement and seamless deployment.

Kevin Ichhpurani, President, Global Partner Ecosystem at Google Cloud:

We’re pleased to celebrate Palo Alto Networks as our Global Technology Partner of the Year… Palo Alto Networks has consistently delivered impactful, AI-driven security solutions that help Google Cloud customers better protect their organizations from evolving threats.

The extensive, long-standing collaboration between Palo Alto Networks and Google Cloud includes jointly engineered offerings, built on 80 solution integrations that help customers build, run and secure AI-enhanced cloud infrastructure and applications with end-to-end protection.

Palo Alto Networks Wins 2026 Global Technology Google Cloud Partner of the Year Award

At Google Cloud Next, Palo Alto Networks has been recognized with four 2026 Google Cloud Partner of the Year awards. By partnering with Google Cloud, we help customers securely leverage the power of the cloud and AI-driven growth with comprehensive cloud-native security offerings. Wins included the following:

• Global Technology
• Marketplace: Technology
• Marketplace: Security
• Security: Artificial Intelligence

These Partner of the Year Awards underscore our expanding partnership with Google Cloud. We share a mutual dedication to improve cloud, network security and AI observability, as well as the progress we’ve made in protecting our joint customers from today’s and tomorrow’s cyberthreats.

By combining our industry-leading security engineering with Google Cloud’s industry-leading cloud infrastructure and services, we’re providing advanced protection for every stage of a customer’s digital journey. We want customers to feel secure from the formative steps of lifting workloads into the cloud, to expanding digital innovation across platforms, to reaching new levels of business scale and velocity.

Protecting these journeys requires alignment and modernization of infrastructure (lift and shift), applications (refactoring) and user access models (zero trust). It requires an advanced AI drive security operations transformation across all IT domains, leveraging machine learning and sophisticated models to minimize human interventions and unguarded sides.

Our relationship with Google Cloud is based on a deep engineering relationship, yielding integrated solutions that help customers achieve better digital outcomes. Our partnership can help your organization eliminate tradeoffs between a cloud-native experience and best-in-class security. We have more than 80 co-engineered integrations, helping to improve and protect hybrid workers, cloud migrations and application modernization efforts.

We remain committed to our goals of outpacing cyberthreats, helping customers at every stage of their cloud journey, and creating a world where tomorrow is more secure than today.

Whether you’re just beginning your cloud journey or managing complex transformational projects, our jointly engineered, AI-driven solutions are designed to deliver seamless, scalable security. Explore the dynamic partnership between Palo Alto Networks and Google Cloud. Join us at Google Cloud Next '26 in Las Vegas from April 22-24 to discover how to secure your development lifecycle from code to cloud.

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Palo Alto Networks recently joined the DNS-OARC community as a Platinum Member. Together, our organizations share a commitment to advancing collaboration in research and operational excellence across the global DNS ecosystem. DNS is critical to both internet infrastructure and security, and this collaboration facilitates the sharing of real-world insights among researchers and practitioners.

Our Contribution

We help organizations secure their digital environment with a comprehensive portfolio of cybersecurity solutions spanning Network, Cloud, Security Operations, AI and Identity. Trusted by more than 70,000 customers worldwide and informed by Unit 42^® Threat Intelligence, their AI-driven platforms help organizations reduce complexity, modernize with confidence, and securely enable innovation.

As a Platinum Member, our subject matter experts will actively participate in the DNS-OARC community by engaging in discussions and contributing to research on evolving DNS threats and network challenges. The growing intersection of DNS and security makes access to intelligence and experience increasingly important. It strengthens the community’s ability to respond to emerging challenges and improves resilience across the internet.

Through our participation, our customers will gain stronger protection informed by community-driven intelligence and real-world operational insight. These learnings are continuously integrated into our threat intelligence and security capabilities. Our participation signals our support for DNS-OARC’s mission of fostering open dialogue and shared learning across the DNS ecosystem. This collaboration helps bridge DNS operations with broader security practices, improving coordination between operators, researchers and security practitioners.

Our Commitment to the DNS-OARC and Global Communities

Collaboration between our organizations strengthens the connection among DNS operations and modern security practices by bringing together operational insight and a global community dedicated to advancing the internet’s resilience.

For the DNS-OARC community, our commitment enhances knowledge sharing around evolving DNS threats, large-scale network operations and practical approaches to emerging challenges.

For organizations and customers, it reinforces a stronger alignment between DNS infrastructure and security, expands access to community-driven intelligence and supports more resilient, well-informed defenses.

Tong Zhao, Senior Manager of DNS Security Engineering, Palo Alto Networks:

We recognize the critical role of DNS-OARC in DNS operations and research. The teams from Palo Alto Networks believe that our DNS-OARC membership aligns perfectly with our goals. We are eager to participate in and contribute to the DNS community.

Our partnership with the DNC-OARC highlights the value of open collaboration in helping both the community and its participants stay ahead of an increasingly complex threat landscape. To learn more about how our expertise and insights support DNS-OARC’s mission to improve the security and stability of the internet’s DNS, visit DNS-OARC.

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Acting swiftly with intent, together with Accenture, Deloitte, IBM, NTT DATA and PwC

With the imminent release of unbounded frontier models, the barrier to entry for sophisticated cyberattacks has vanished. Anthropic’s Mythos represents a 50% leap in coding capability over previous models. It’s a leap that, as Lee Klarich stated, translates into autonomous agents capable of both surfacing a massive surge of vulnerabilities and exploiting them faster than we’ve ever seen or imagined.

In this new era, business continuity requires more than just better tools; it requires a unified ecosystem of experts capable of orchestrating a defense that matches this new pace of attack.

As we drive the industry standard for addressing these emerging risks with our Unit 42^® Frontier AI Defense, we’ve united an alliance of global transformation leaders, starting with Accenture, Deloitte, IBM, NTT DATA and PwC, and will continue to scale these alliances to ensure every enterprise has a rapid path to AI resilience.

By combining the world’s most advanced AI security platform with deep industry expertise, we are delivering the security assessment and rapid protection needed to help customers stop emerging threats and keep their business resilient.

By engaging directly with Palo Alto Networks, or working with our partners through the Frontier AI Alliance, our customers can move past the complexity of building an AI-ready defense from scratch and gain:

• Accelerated Immunity: Go from a high-exposure state to a hardened posture using a prevalidated AI Defense Blueprint, delivering coverage in weeks, not years.
• On-Demand Expertise: Our partners provide the specialized prompting and verification required to make the latest AI Frontier models work for the defender.
• Operational Resilience: While Unit 42 provides the Frontier AI Exposure Analysis, our ecosystem partners provide the boots on the ground to remediate those findings and leverage our product portfolio to deliver AI-readiness to your enterprise.

The threat of Mythos-class models is imminent, but the path to resilience is clear. Whether you are looking for an immediate strategic assessment or a deep operational overhaul, the Frontier AI Alliance is ready to move at the speed of your business.

The post The AI Ecosystem Edge — Introducing Our Frontier AI Alliance appeared first on Palo Alto Networks Blog.

The release of the newest frontier AI models marks a turning point for cybersecurity. Palo Alto Networks has conducted early testing of the latest frontier AI models, including Anthropic’s Mythos model as part of Project Glasswing and OpenAI’s latest models as part of Trusted Access for Cyber program. The conclusion is clear: They are extraordinarily capable at finding vulnerabilities and generating corresponding exploits.

This generational improvement in coding ability directly translates to a significant advance in vulnerability discovery and exploit generation. These capabilities, however guardrailed, will not stay contained. Similar advances will appear across other major AI labs, Chinese models, and open source models. Attackers will find the seams in those guardrails. They will use advanced AI to discover zero-day vulnerabilities at scale, generate exploits in near real time, and develop autonomous attack agents unlike anything the industry has faced.

Within six months, advanced AI models with deep cybersecurity capabilities will become commonplace. Organizations that have not put appropriate safeguards in place will face an entirely new class of risk across their enterprise and critical infrastructure.

Frontier AI: A Quantum Leap in Code Fluency

As you have probably already seen, the latest unbounded models like Mythos represent roughly a 50% improvement in coding efficiency over Anthropic’s previous leading model. Palo Alto Networks has had early access to unbounded models and we’ve been able to leverage this vast improvement in coding to a quantum leap in scanning and offensive capability.

Hundreds of our best security engineers have been assessing these capabilities and developing best practices for using it effectively. The results revealed several core truths:

• Vulnerability discovery at scale: Frontier AI is exceptionally effective at identifying vulnerabilities in code. In less than three weeks, it accomplished the equivalent of a full year’s worth of penetration testing effort.
• Attack path determination: Perhaps more impressive than finding individual vulnerabilities, Frontier AI excels at vulnerability chaining, combining multiple lower-severity issues into critical-level exploit paths. For example, linking two medium-severity and one low-severity vulnerability into a single critical exploit.
• Full-stack logic analysis: Frontier AI can analyze the full exposure surface of applications, including SaaS and public-facing platforms, identifying logic-based vulnerabilities that traditional tools miss.

Impacts on the Cyber Landscape

Attackers have been using LLMs for years, but based on our testing of frontier AI models, there are three key areas where they will have a significant impact on the cybersecurity landscape:

1. The Vulnerability Deluge: Frontier AI models will dramatically accelerate the rate at which vulnerabilities are discovered, by defenders and attackers alike. This will be particularly acute in open source and critically, the flood of patches that follows will itself create risk. Every patch that is not applied immediately becomes a known, targetable vulnerability. Organizations will need to accelerate and automate their patching programs, rethink how they prioritize and apply patches, and ensure best-in-class protections are in place to mitigate vulnerability until they can be remediated.
2. Rise of Inside-Out Attacks: Recent supply chain attacks on tools like LiteLLM and Trivy demonstrate a growing pattern where attacks land adversaries inside an organization’s infrastructure, bypassing multiple conventional attack steps and reducing the number of prevention opportunities available to defenders. The rapid deployment of AI infrastructure has made this problem more acute as the AI supply chain, including runtime environments, communication infrastructure, and model dependencies, is often insufficiently protected. While open source usage and patching practices must become significantly more robust, organizations will need structural containment of potential attacks through zero trust, identity modernization, outbound connection restrictions and lateral movement protections.
3. Faster AI-Assisted Attack Cycles: I expect the most consequential shift with frontier AI models is the move from AI-assisted to AI-driven attacks. Attackers will build autonomous attack agents that dramatically compress attack cycle times. What once took days or weeks of skilled manual effort will soon be executed in minutes. This democratization of advanced attack capabilities means that defenders must match that speed with near-real-time detection and response, which is only possible with extensive AI and automation throughout security operations. Organizations whose Mean Time to Detection and Mean Time to Response are not measured in low single-digit minutes will be outpaced.

The Defenders Guide: Assessment, Protection, Platformization

The framework for defending against AI-driven threats is not completely new, but the standard for execution must be absolute. Organizations that are “mostly protected” are effectively unprotected. What follows is a phased approach – assessment, protection and platformization – that organizations should pursue in parallel to close gaps before attackers exploit them.

Assessment: Every organization should use the latest AI models to assess its entire code and application landscape and build a comprehensive asset and exposure inventory.

Key priorities:

• Leverage AI models to identify vulnerabilities across your codebase, applications and infrastructure before attackers do.
• Evaluate exposure with full context, including how vulnerabilities chain together to form critical exploit paths.
• Audit your open source supply chain, including AI infrastructure, runtime environments and model dependencies.
• Map your current sensor coverage. Detection, prevention and telemetry gaps represent critical blind spots.

Protect & Remediation: Remediating and reducing exposure is table-stakes. What in the past may have been difficult due to cross-organizational friction of finding and fixing at pace should now be accelerated with the c-suite attention of these new AI models. But this must go further and extend to comprehensive deployment of best-in-class attack prevention capabilities where the new standard is 100% coverage and optimization.

• XDR everywhere, with emphasis on real-time ML-based detection and prevention of attacks; all hosts on prem and cloud included.
• Agentic endpoint security to secure wide-scale adoption of vibe coding and AI security across the enterprise (e.g. Prisma AIRS and our recent acquisition of Koi is now a necessity for securing the agentic endpoint).
• With an average of 85% of work now happening in the browser, secure enterprise browsers with real-time security become a must-have for attack prevention.
• Zero trust and identity security are foundational to securing every user and every connection.

Real-Time Security Operations: With attack cycle times shrinking rapidly, the legacy approach to security operations simply doesn’t work. Disparate tools analyzing data in silos overlaid with manual processes must be replaced with AI and automation throughout. Cortex XSIAM, our AI-driven SOC platform, is what I consider to be the gold standard for how to take a next-generation approach to deliver MTTD and MTTR in single digit minutes.

• Attack detections must be AI/ML driven to detect even frequently-changing and novel attacks at scale.
• These AI detections must operate against a wide range of 1st party and 3rd party data sources – a best in class AI SOC must operate on ALL relevant data sources.
• Automation both natively integrated and throughout the SOC lifecycle is necessary to achieve single digit MTTR; this automation will increasingly be agentic.
• This must be delivered as a platform to remove the seams and gaps between point solutions.

We’re Here to Help

Achieving this level of resilience requires the right platforms and the right expertise.

To help you navigate this shift, we are introducing Unit 42 Frontier AI Defense. This new offering is designed to discover and remediate your current exposure before attackers do, strengthen controls that reduce exposure and contain impact and modernize operations so teams can detect and respond at machine speed.

This is the moment we’ve been preparing for. The threat has never been more sophisticated, but the path forward has never been clearer, and we’re here to partner with you on what comes next.

The post Defender's Guide to the Frontier AI Impact on Cybersecurity appeared first on Palo Alto Networks Blog.

Frontier AI models have given the security industry a preview of what comes next. As they become weaponized, attackers will automate the discovery and chaining of vulnerabilities in near real-time – compressing timelines, increasing scale and outpacing human-led defense.

Until now, defenders have had time to detect activity, investigate signals and contain threats before exposures were chained into full attacks. AI is quickly closing this window.

Defending against AI-driven threats means engineering a resilient architecture that limits how easily attackers can exploit discovered weaknesses, that contains the blast radius when they do, and enables faster response at scale. It also means using AI to accelerate the security program itself, from vulnerability discovery and code review to triage, remediation and incident response.

The transition should cover three areas. First, discover and remediate your current exposure before attackers do. Second, strengthen controls that reduce exposure and contain impact. Third, modernize operations so teams can detect and respond in real-time.

To help organizations make this shift, Palo Alto Networks is launching Unit 42^® Frontier AI Defense.

Powered by the latest AI models, Unit 42 Frontier AI Defense helps organizations answer a critical question: Are your defenses ready for AI-powered attacks?

Unit 42 Frontier AI Defense combines three core components delivered by expert consultants, coupled with 6 months of complimentary access to Cortex^® XDR, Cortex Xpanse^® and Koi Agentic Security.

Frontier AI Exposure Analysis: Identify and validate the exposures most likely to be chained into real attacks before attackers weaponize them.

Actions

• • Use the latest frontier models, Unit 42 offensive security expertise, threat telemetry and Unit 42 Threat Intelligence to assess your environment.
  • Identify the vulnerabilities, misconfigurations and posture gaps most likely to be exploited across infrastructure, applications, code, identity and cloud.
  • Validate the attack paths most likely to matter in real-world attacks.

Outputs

• • A prioritized view of vulnerabilities and attack paths that matter most
  • Clear actions to fix the exposures that matter first

Autonomous Security Blueprint: Benchmark current capabilities and define the changes required for machine-speed defense.

Actions

• • Assess current-state capabilities across attack surface, identity, software supply chain, zero trust containment, as well as real-time detection and response.
  • Identify where AI-powered threats create the greatest exposure and where current controls are most likely to fail.
  • Define the technical and operational changes required to close those gaps.

Outputs

• • A clear blueprint for immediate action
  • A prioritized roadmap to reduce exposure, strengthen containment and modernize security for the AI era

Agentic Defense Transformation: Implement the prioritized architecture, control and operating changes needed to modernize defenses for AI-driven threats.

Actions

• • Implement the architectural, operational and control changes required to defend against AI-driven threats.
  • Modernize exposure management, harden the software supply chain, and advance zero trust architecture.
  • Build response capabilities that can keep pace with autonomous attacks.

Outputs

• • Accelerated implementation of the changes that matter most
  • A more modern security architecture, built to reduce exposure and improve containment

The Window Is Still Open, for Now

AI is the biggest security inflection point since enterprises moved to the cloud. Organizations that act now will be the ones that are ready. Those that wait will be forced to respond under maximum pressure on the worst possible day.

Frontier AI is changing what is possible for attackers. In the hands of defenders, it can become a decisive advantage.

Human-speed security is no longer enough. A modern security approach is required. Get started with Unit 42 Frontier AI Defense today.

*The complimentary offer is not available to public sector customers or current Cortex XDR, Cortex Xpanse or Koi customers.

The post Introducing Unit 42 Frontier AI Defense appeared first on Palo Alto Networks Blog.

Our Commitment to Data Autonomy and National Resilience

The United Kingdom has established itself as a leading global cyber power. Over the last decade, Palo Alto Networks has been proud to work alongside British institutions to protect the digital borders of a highly innovative economy. As UK organisations navigate an evolving threat landscape and adopt transformative technologies, like AI, the need for security partners who understand British operational realities has never been greater.

The Path to Digital Autonomy, Resilience and Control

Organisations today require more than a technology provider. They need a partner that understands the specific legal frameworks and strategic priorities of the British landscape. We are reaffirming our deep commitment to the UK, safeguarding British data as a core part of national resilience, even as both technology and cyber adversaries evolve.

The targeting of UK infrastructure is a daily operational reality. According to our Unit 42 2026 Global Incident Response Report, attackers are moving at unprecedented speed, with exfiltration speeds for the fastest attacks quadrupling in 2025. Identity weaknesses played a material role in almost 90% of Unit 42® investigations, as attackers increasingly exploit stolen credentials and fragmented identity systems to escalate privileges and move laterally. These threats span across all sectors, from NHS patient data to local government systems and energy networks.

UK organisations need partners who understand their unique requirements. While our broader European commitments provide a strong foundation, we recognise that the UK requires a dedicated focus across data protection, critical infrastructure security and public-private collaboration. This includes a deep-rooted local presence, aligning our operations with national standards of protection to support British ingenuity and ambition.

Control Over Your Data

Genuine data control requires two things: understanding exactly how and under which laws your information is handled and having the technical capabilities to enforce that control.

For UK customers, we provide the capability to host data within UK-based infrastructure, ensuring that critical data can be stored in regions that align with UK data protection requirements. Additionally, for applicable products and services, we offer Bring Your Own Encryption Keys (BYOK) capabilities, giving you direct control over the encryption protecting your data.

Our agreements are built to comply with UK GDPR requirements and include the necessary protections for any cross-border data transfers. But beyond contractual obligations, we operate on a fundamental principle: Your data serves only the purpose for which you’ve engaged us.

How we handle different data categories:

1. Customer and Personal Data Are Processed Only to Serve You

We process your Customer Data and Personal Data exclusively to deliver the services you have purchased. This includes the content of your communications and files uploaded for support. The purpose is singular: delivering the security and protection you’ve contracted us to provide.

2. Systems Data Is Used to Enhance Functionality and Collective Defence

To provide effective security, our products generate Systems Data, which includes technical logs, performance metrics and threat indicators. This information serves three main purposes: ensuring the day-to-day functionality of your services, enabling our teams to provide expert technical support and troubleshooting, and powering our global threat research capabilities.

When a new threat is detected against a specific UK sector, our entire network receives updated protection within minutes. This allows British organisations to benefit from global threat intelligence. We handle Systems Data in ways that preserve your operational privacy, ensuring the intelligence value comes from understanding threat patterns, not identifying individual organisations.

For detailed technical information on how we categorise and handle data, see our Customer Data, Personal Data and Systems Data whitepapers.

Transparency in Practice

We publish a biannual Transparency Report detailing all government and law enforcement data requests we receive. This isn’t simply about compliance. It’s about providing UK organisations with verifiable evidence of how we handle requests, enabling informed risk assessment and governance oversight. For more information, please visit the Privacy Section in our Trust Center.

Securing Critical National Infrastructure

The UK’s 13 sectors of Critical National Infrastructure represent the backbone of society. These sectors require security solutions built with an understanding of their unique threat models, from the specific requirements of an NHS trust to the challenges facing an energy provider.

We currently serve hundreds of UK public sector organisations across government, health and critical infrastructure sectors, which include the UK Government, UK Home Office and the Ministry of Justice.

Operational Resilience

For the UK’s most critical services, operational resilience is paramount. Our security platforms are designed for high availability and reliability, helping organisations maintain continuous protection even during disruptions.

Trust and Transparency

Palo Alto Networks is deeply integrated into the UK’s security ecosystem, ensuring our solutions exceed national benchmarks for resilience and transparency.

We hold Cyber Essentials Plus certification and align with the NCSC Cloud Security Principles, providing assurance to customers that we adhere to the highest security protocols to protect their most critical assets. As a Software Security Ambassador and a committed supporter of the NCSC Telecom Vendor Assessment, we are committed to enhancing the security of the UK’s telecommunications and software supply chains.

Beyond compliance, our Unit 42 team serves as an NCSC-assured Cyber Incident Response (CIR) Enhanced Level provider, offering specialised incident support to help UK organisations navigate and recover from the most complex incidents. For customers with specific requirements, particularly in defence and national security, we can provide support from personnel in countries with compatible security standards and legal frameworks. We are committed to the Telecommunications Security Act (TSA) Code of Practice, supporting the resilience of the UK’s public telecommunications networks.

Strengthening Local Expertise with National Impact

Our investment in the UK extends across our people, infrastructure and local expertise. Operating from our London hub, we remain deeply connected to the communities we serve and make a direct and indirect contribution to the UK economy. Our UK-based teams span engineering, threat research, professional services, policy and security strategy, and have a deep understanding of the UK market and the requirements of our customers. We also partner with NCSC CyberFirst and others on developing the next generation of cyber talent, and our Cyber Academy Program partners with universities and colleges all over the UK to train the next generation of cyber defenders.

A Partnership Built on Trust and Verifiable Commitments

The UK’s digital autonomy increasingly depends on its ability to secure both cyber infrastructure and the emerging AI economy. This requires partnerships that serve the UK’s long-term national interests, grounded in trusted institutions, local expertise and transparency that enables commitments to be verified, not simply asserted.

We recognise that the UK’s cyber landscape is shaped by its legal framework, strategic priorities and threat environment. From protecting critical infrastructure to enabling the secure adoption of AI, organisations across the UK need to trust their security partner to deliver on their commitments. Palo Alto Networks is committed to maintaining and increasing that trust through verifiable action, transparency, accountability and an enduring partnership.

To learn more about our comprehensive commitment to digital trust, privacy and security, visit the Palo Alto Networks Trust Center.

The post Securing the UK’s Digital Future appeared first on Palo Alto Networks Blog.

Delivering Exceptional Branch Experience for Modern Distributed Enterprises

In modern enterprises, the "network perimeter" is a relic of the past. As organizations scale globally to support home offices, satellite branches and third-party clouds, the challenge has shifted. Now the onus is on optimizing the end-to-end digital experience. And to maintain that edge, enterprises must operate at machine speed, supported by agentic autonomous operations. They must make sure that every user, regardless of their location or underlying hardware, experiences uninterrupted performance, seamless security and peak user experience from “Day 0” to keep pace with the speed of business.

To meet this demand, we are proud to announce the general availability of the Autonomous Digital Experience Management Universal Agent, or ADEM Universal Agent, for Prisma^® Access customers. This breakthrough marks a significant milestone in our mission to automate deployment and operations by unifying fragmented infrastructure and providing the flexibility to deploy, using infrastructure hardware of your choice.

Continued Data Gap Is a Roadblock for Agentic Operations

Organizations are shifting toward "best-of-breed" architectures to operate at machine speed, but they often lack the unified telemetry required for automated operations. Any tool built on top of this architecture to enhance the digital experience is only as effective as the data it consumes. Traditional monitoring tools often lack the precise data and contextual correlation needed to drive agentic resolution. In this siloed landscape, three critical gaps have emerged:

• Data Entropy: Fragmented data is inconsistent and leads to unreliable automation. Without unified data, automated workflows become unreliable and risky to execute at scale.
• Hardware Dependency: Traditional monitoring agents often require specific hardware platforms, which can severely limit deployment speed and the ability to adapt to diverse customer infrastructures.
• Blind Spots: Data entropy and hardware dependency have resulted in data gaps, and therefore visibility gaps at the edge, and as a result, automated systems cannot pinpoint root causes, leaving IT teams trapped in manual troubleshooting.

To operate at machine speed, enterprises need more than visibility. They need a unified, high-fidelity data engine to create the foundation of fail-safe autonomous operations for a stellar digital experience.

The Universal Agent Contributes to a Unified Data Engine for Agentic Autonomy

The ADEM Universal Agent is a hardware-agnostic solution that can be deployed on any branch site connecting to Prisma Access. It can be hosted on virtual machines or Docker containers, regardless of the underlying infrastructure. ADEM Universal Agent transforms branch experiences by providing a unified data engine for agentic operations:

• Deploy Anywhere and Monitor Everywhere
  The Universal Agent can be deployed at any branch site connected to Prisma Access, enabling IT teams to run synthetic tests from the branch regardless of underlying infrastructure hardware.

• Bridge the Gap Between Vendor-Locked Silos and Machine-Speed Operations
  The Universal Agent aggregates disparate environment data into key metrics geared toward agentic operations, enabling IT teams to move beyond fragmented troubleshooting, toward unified, proactive governance of their entire IT footprint.

• Accelerate Troubleshooting with Granular Path Analysis
  When a user in a remote branch reports a slowdown, IT teams need more than a "red/green" status light. The Universal Agent provides a granular path analysis, delivering a hop-by-hop visualization with both overlay and underlay tunnel metrics, enabling them to quickly pinpoint bottlenecks.

Thus, by mapping the entire path from the Universal Agent to the target application, IT teams can pinpoint exactly where the friction lies.

• Is it a local network issue?
• An ISP (internet service provider) bottleneck?
• A bottleneck at a handoff between providers?
• Is the application's own network at fault?

The Universal Agent Offers Inherent Security and Operational Simplicity

To help ensure that organizations can maintain peak performance and security amidst a constant stream of changes, the Universal Agent is built on a foundation of robust features:

• Native Integration with Prisma Access for Accelerated Troubleshooting
  The Universal Agent is natively integrated with Prisma Access and automatically discovers the POP (Point of Presence) location and IP infrastructure where the branch site is connected to monitor overlay and underlay, hop-by-hop, ISP health, all the way to the application to deliver precise root-cause analysis.

• Simplified Deployment at Scale
  IT teams can deploy and manage multiple agents at scale with just a few clicks from the Strata™ Cloud Manager Platform. Through our autonomous AI operations platform, we leverage enriched telemetry to watch the network and proactively manage it all from a unified platform.

• Comprehensive Full-Stack Visibility
  We utilize a single agent per branch site to deliver deep visibility into both overlay and underlay tunnel metrics. This granular path analysis allows IT teams to pinpoint network bottlenecks using hop-by-hop visualizations from the Universal Agent all the way to the target application.

The Universal Agent Optimizes End-to-End Digital Experience with Unified Operations

The launch of the ADEM Universal Agent represents a fundamental shift in how we architect the distributed enterprise, from moving beyond managing data gaps into agentic, machine-speed orchestration. Natively integrated with Prisma Access, the Universal Agent synthesizes disparate network data across multiple branch sites into a unified, vendor-agnostic ecosystem. By eliminating the 'noise' of traditional monitoring, it provides the deterministic precision and real-time context required to fuel agentic autonomous operations, enabling every automated action to be accurate, impactful and optimized for a flawless digital experience.

Ready to gain complete application experience from all branch sites and remote users? Watch our announcement video below to see the Universal Agent in action. Visit the ADEM webpage for more information or request a demo.

The post Announcing ADEM Universal Agent appeared first on Palo Alto Networks Blog.

Securing the AI-Powered Hybrid Multicloud

At the core of every modern enterprise is a fundamental need: The ability to innovate across hybrid environments without sacrificing security. For over five years, Palo Alto Networks and Nutanix have partnered to meet this need, building a collaborative ecosystem where industry-leading infrastructure meets the world’s most comprehensive AI-powered security.

As we look toward the future of the enterprise at Nutanix .NEXT 2026, our focus remains on a shared vision for the "Secure Nutanix Cloud."

2026 Global Security Partner of the Year

We are deeply honored to be named the Nutanix 2026 Global Security Partner of the Year. This recognition reflects our commitment to delivering integrated, automated security that feels like a native part of the Nutanix experience. Together, we have helped thousands of joint customers move from reactive security to a proactive, zero trust posture that spans the data center, the edge and the public cloud.

The Existing Partnership Is the Foundation of Trust

Our partnership is built on the belief that security should be invisible, automated and inseparable from the infrastructure it protects. We’ve worked alongside Nutanix to enable enterprises to scale their hybrid multicloud, and their security posture scales with it. Current integrations provide zero trust protection across the Nutanix environment:

• VM-Series Virtual Firewalls – Seamlessly integrated with Nutanix AHV and Flow Network Security, our virtual firewalls provide Layer 7 visibility and advanced threat prevention for east-west traffic. This integration leverages Nutanix Flow service chaining to automatically steer traffic through VM-Series firewalls for deep packet inspection without manual reconfiguration. It delivers full functional parity and operational continuity for Nutanix AHV environments, allowing security teams to maintain high-performance standards using familiar Panorama® management and persistent, tag-based policies that migrate with workloads across clusters.
• Hybrid Cloud Security – We provide consistent security for Nutanix Cloud Clusters (NC2) on both AWS and Azure, enabling your policies to follow your workloads wherever they reside.
• Automation & Orchestration – Leveraging the Panorama® plugin for Nutanix, teams can automate security provisioning and use Dynamic Address Groups to sync application attributes instantly.

New Integration Secures Nutanix Enterprise AI (NAI)

Building on this foundation, the highlight of this year’s show is our groundbreaking integration designed to accelerate Enterprise AI adoption. NAI provides a simplified, cloud-native stack that allows organizations to deploy and scale large language models (LLMs) across their choice of infrastructure with push-button simplicity. We are collaborating on a first-of-its-kind, end-to-end security solution for NAI.

This integration, launching soon, will bring AI Model Security and AI Red Teaming directly into the NAI, creating a seamless experience where security is built in, not bolted on. By allowing only Prisma AIRS™ validated models to reach production, we eliminate security friction at the start of the AI lifecycle. Every model will undergo rigorous scans for known vulnerabilities before deployment, providing a "clean room" environment for AI development. Providing a proactive test of AI defenses, Prisma AIRS AI Red Teaming will be available within NAI as an autonomous solution that integrates seamlessly into the development pipeline, utilizing a combination of a profiler and an attacker agent to perform contextual iterative simulations that mirror real-world attacker behavior. By providing detailed reports that map vulnerabilities directly to the OWASP Top 10 for LLMs and NIST AI RMF, it equips teams with the precise context needed to secure AI applications continuously and effectively.

By proactively identifying and neutralizing emerging threats, we will give organizations the confidence to deploy AI bravely, knowing their innovation is anchored in the world’s most robust security platform.

Powered by Prisma AIRS, this integration will bring a "security-first" approach to your AI deployments:

• AI Model Security – Scans AI models during the download phase to block malicious code and hidden backdoors before they reach your environment.
• AI Red Teaming – Provides continuous, autonomous vulnerability hunting on models, application and agent endpoints, testing your AI behavior against more than 750 real-world attack scenarios and contextual agentic risk assessment.
• Unified Visibility – Provides a complete overview of your AI risk posture and scan summaries directly within your NAI dashboards.

Benefits:

Seamless and Frictionless Deployment

We will prioritize a fast and frictionless deployment experience, ensuring that robust AI security does not come at the cost of development speed. By integrating these controls directly into the NAI workflow, organizations will be able to deploy and scale their AI initiatives with "push-button" simplicity, removing the traditional complexity and friction associated with securing large language models.

Proactive Protection Against Emerging Threats

Leveraging our deep expertise in threat prevention, this solution will proactively identify and block vulnerable or malicious models before they can impact the enterprise environment. By scanning models for hidden backdoors and malicious code during the initial download phase, we will stop threats at the perimeter, allowing only validated, secure models to ever reach your production environment.

A Comprehensive Enterprise Cloud AI Solution

This integration will deliver a comprehensive enterprise cloud AI solution, merging Nutanix’s industry-leading infrastructure with our next-generation security controls. The result will be a unified, cloud-native stack where security is built in rather than bolted on after the workload deployment, providing a secured deployment environment, which is consistent across the data center, the edge and public cloud.

Evolving Insights and Real-Time Remediation

The vulnerability insights from AI Red Teaming are coupled with remediation insights. The platform will provide a prioritized list of remediation steps that are tailor-made for the endpoint. This allows organizations to battle-test their inference endpoints before deploying them at scale.

Key Takeaways

• A Proven, Award-Winning Partnership: Celebrating five years of collaboration, Palo Alto Networks has been named the Nutanix 2026 Global Security Partner of the Year, highlighting a shared commitment to delivering native, automated zero trust security for hybrid multicloud environments.
• Seamless Zero Trust for Hybrid Workloads: Through deep integrations with VM-Series virtual firewalls and Nutanix Cloud Clusters (NC2), organizations can maintain consistent Layer 7 visibility and tag-based security policies that automatically follow workloads across on-premises data centers and public clouds.
• Securing the AI Lifecycle with Prisma AIRS: The new integration with NAI, launching soon, will bring a security-first approach to AI adoption, utilizing Prisma AIRS to scan LLMs for vulnerabilities during download, and perform autonomous Red Teaming to neutralize emerging threats before they reach production.

Don’t Miss Our Speaking Session

Want to see the integration in action? Join our experts, Shrikant Brahmbhatt (Palo Alto Networks) and Ashwini Vasanth (Nutanix), on Tuesday April 7 3:30-4pm for an exclusive look at how we are securing the "Challenge of Hybrid AI." We’ll dive into the architecture that allows you to discover, assess and protect your entire AI ecosystem (apps, agents and models alike).

Visit Us at Booth #G2

Stop by the Palo Alto Networks booth (#G2) to meet our team of over 19,000 active threat researchers and see live demos of our joint solutions. Whether you are building the next generation of agentic AI or securing your virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), we have the tools to help you innovate at machine speed.

Ready to secure your journey? Visit the Palo Alto Networks partner directory or learn more about Prisma AIRS.

Forward-Looking Statements

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. These forward-looking statements are not guarantees of future performance, and there are a significant number of factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from statements made in this blog, including, without limitation: developments and changes in general market, political, economic, and business conditions; risks associated with managing our growth; risks associated with new products and subscription and support offerings; shifts in priorities or delays in the development or release of new offerings, or the failure to timely develop, release and achieve market acceptance of new products and subscriptions as well as existing products and subscription and support offerings; failure of our business strategies; rapidly evolving technological developments in the market for security products and subscription and support offerings; our customers’ purchasing decisions and the length of sales cycles; our competition; our ability to attract and retain new customers; and our ability to acquire and integrate other companies, products, or technologies. We identify certain important risks and uncertainties that could affect our results and performance in our most recent Annual Report on Form 10-K, our most recent Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q, and our other filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission from time-to-time, each of which are available on our website at investors.paloaltonetworks.com and on the SEC's website at www.sec.gov. All forward-looking statements in this blog 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 Palo Alto Networks at Nutanix .NEXT 2026 appeared first on Palo Alto Networks Blog.

In the race to digitise public services, the UK’s digital estate has grown into a vast, borderless ecosystem that manual audits can no longer track. For UK Government departments, local authorities and NHS trusts, it is a sprawling, shifting landscape of cloud workloads, legacy infrastructure, shadow IT and third-party supplier connections.

This complexity creates blind spots that modern threats exploit. Recognising this vulnerability, the UK Government is moving toward a secure-by-design digital infrastructure, with the 2026 Government Cyber Action Plan (GCAP) setting a high bar for resilience. A central theme of the GCAP is the urgent need for the government to have better visibility of cyber security and resilience risk. Fundamentally, organisations cannot secure what they cannot see. As the GCAP explicitly states, the Government will use “data sources from across the government to truly understand government-wide and departmental cyber risks.”

The Challenge: Visibility in a “Landscape”

Many public sector organisations rely on a complex web of spreadsheets, data calls, legacy tools and manually curated lists to create an inventory of their internet-connected assets. But attackers do not look at an organisation's internal lists; they scan the internet for what they have forgotten to secure. Whether it is an unpatched server from a legacy project or a misconfigured database in a department, these "unknown unknowns" are the primary entry points for attackers.

The Strategic Mission: Empowering the Public Sector and Critical Industries

Palo Alto Networks Cortex Xpanse® is an active external attack surface management (EASM) solution that provides an outside-in view of organisations' entire digital footprint. It helps leaders meet national resilience goals:

• Comprehensive, Continuous Visibility: Xpanse scans the global internet space continuously and identifies every asset associated with an organisation, without requiring software agents to be installed on your systems.
• Accelerate Response: Leveraging automation, the solution streamlines response processes and enhances collaboration across dispersed teams from the sharing of findings to tracking actions and remediation.
• Supply Chain Integrity: Inline with the new Cyber Security and Resilience Bill (bringing managed service providers and critical third parties into scope), Xpanse allows organisations to assess the internet-facing security posture of third-party partners and suppliers, ensuring a weak link elsewhere doesn't compromise the broader mission.
• Alignment with GovAssure: Xpanse provides a consolidated risk profile and inventory for all internet-facing and cloud assets required for GovAssure assessments, turning a manual, months-long audit process into a continuous, data-driven cycle.
• Investment prioritisation: Xpanse provides that much needed visibility to help executive committees and boards prioritise investment decisions on legacy IT and technical debt.

Aligning to National Cybersecurity Centre (NCSC) Guidance

Palo Alto Networks Cortex Xpanse aligns with the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) external attack surface management (EASM) buyer's guide by providing automated discovery, continuous monitoring and risk prioritisation of internet-facing assets. It replaces manual, point-in-time audits with a proactive, agentless solution. By automating the discovery of all internet-accessible assets (including shadow IT and unmanaged cloud operations) the platform fulfills the NCSC’s core requirement for continuous global monitoring and rapid attribution. This data-driven approach allows for the automated prioritisation of critical exposures, such as RDP, and integrates seamlessly with multiple third-party automation and visualisation tools, including Cortex XSOAR® and XSIAM, to accelerate remediation with national incident response standards.

In fact, with Palo Alto Networks deployment of Cortex Xpanse, we were able to achieve a 95% reduction in external vulnerability management spending across more than 700,000 cloud instances, while improving coverage and outcomes.

Palo Alto Networks Cortex Xpanse Capabilities

• Discover Assets: Leveraging organisations' known asset inventory and other data points, Xpanse performs continual, automated discovery of all internet-accessible assets, effectively eliminating blind spots created by shadow IT and unmanaged cloud operations.
• Obtain Information: Always-on, continuous monitoring of an organisation's entire attack surface through daily scans of the global IP address space, ensuring that newly exposed services are identified quickly and accurately.
• Perform Analysis: Xpanse automates and prioritises alerts on all identified risks by severity, enabling organisations to optimise resolution and risk management, allowing teams to properly allocate resources and focus on the most critical risks to the organisation.
• Display Information and Provide Advice: Leveraging a unified view of the internet facing and cloud-based estate, Xpanse provides specific resolver guidance for every identified issue, supporting and monitoring automated resolution through multiple native integrations.
• Monitor Risk: Always on, discreet continual monitoring provides an independent real time status of the digital estate. Leveraging the threat intelligence capabilities of Palo Alto Networks, Xpanse is uniquely positioned to provide rapid coverage for newly discovered vulnerabilities, exploits or misconfigurations.

Securing the public sector requires a move from manual, point in time assessments to data-driven intelligence. Cortex Xpanse provides the foundations to remove blind spots, secure the supply chain and prevent unknown vulnerabilities in the face of sophisticated threats.

For further information and case studies, visit the links below, or schedule a demo.

• Palo Alto Networks: Slash false positives, remediation time budget with Cortex attack surface management.
• U.S. Pentagon: Palo Alto Networks Cortex Xpanse supercharge the Cyber Defences for the Department of Defense.
• Accenture: Secure rapid growth with Cortex Xpanse.

The post Closing the Gap by Enhancing Visibility and Mitigating Risks appeared first on Palo Alto Networks Blog.

Forging Secure AI Threat Protection for Singapore

Singapore is currently undergoing a decisive transition toward an AI-enabled economy. National initiatives are focused on driving large-scale transformation through the National AI Missions and integrating advanced technologies, including generative AI and autonomous agents across key sectors. This rapid technological evolution, however, also introduces a sophisticated threat landscape characterized by AI-specific risks, like prompt injection, model manipulation and sensitive data leakage. As enterprises scale AI adoption, the need for robust, AI-native and locally hosted cybersecurity solutions becomes essential to ensure data residency, regulatory alignment and operational resilience.

Strategic Imperatives for an Emerging AI Security Landscape

Singapore’s highly integrated digital ecosystem presents both significant opportunities for leadership as well as distinct security challenges. As the nation executes its National AI Strategy 2.0, the focus has shifted from high-level experimentation to the pervasive deployment of AI across the economy. This evolution requires a security posture that is not only AI-native but locally grounded to satisfy the data residency expectations of a global financial and innovation hub.

Palo Alto Networks is pleased to announce a strategic investment designed to enhance Singapore’s cyber resilience – the establishment of our new cloud landing for Prisma^® AIRS. This launch demonstrates a commitment to providing organizations in the region with an AI-powered cybersecurity platform that aligns with the National AI Council’s whole-of-government mission. This initiative optimizes operational efficiency and facilitates the secure adoption of advanced digital transformation projects, allowing organizations to Deploy Bravely.

Comprehensive AI Security Platform

The new regional expansion in Singapore now hosts Prisma AIRS, our most comprehensive AI security platform, specifically engineered to deliver robust security across the entire AI lifecycle. This localized landing provides Singaporean organizations with domestic, high-performance access to critical AI security capabilities:

AI Model Security
Enable the safe adoption of third-party AI models by scanning them for vulnerabilities and secure your AI ecosystem against risks, such as model tampering, malicious scripts and deserialization attacks.

AI Red Teaming
Uncover potential exposure and lurking risks before bad actors do. Perform automated penetration tests on your AI apps and models using our Red Teaming agent that stress tests your AI deployments. Our agent learns and adapts like a real attacker.

AI Runtime Security
Protect your LLM-powered AI apps, models and data against runtime threats, such as prompt injection, malicious code, toxic content, sensitive data leaks, resource overload, hallucinations and more.

AI Agent SSPM (SaaS Security Posture Management)
Secure AI agents (including those built on no-code/low-code platforms) against new agentic threats, such as identity impersonation, memory manipulation and tool misuse.

Commitment to Singapore's AI Future

Our new region expansion into Singapore signifies the long-term commitment of Palo Alto Networks to the nation’s digital transformation journey and its cybersecurity resilience. By bringing advanced, AI-native platforms closer to regional organizations, Palo Alto Networks helps enterprises achieve data residency and national data sovereignty needs, enhance performance and strengthen security posture. This localized presence simplifies operations and accelerates the safe adoption of generative AI and agentic workflows.

As Singapore continues its trajectory toward an AI-driven and secure future, Palo Alto Networks stands as a trusted partner, empowering organizations to innovate and thrive securely within an evolving threat landscape. The establishment of this new cloud landing reinforces the ongoing promise to deliver the best-in-class cybersecurity platforms that the country requires to lead on the global stage.

Please visit the regional cloud locations of Palo Alto Networks for more information.

The post Announcing Prisma AIRS Availability in Singapore Region appeared first on Palo Alto Networks Blog.

A Pivotal Moment for National Security

As the digital landscape undergoes profound shifts, the recently released National Cyber Strategy provides the essential foundation for enduring American leadership. By prioritizing the disruption of hostile actors, future-proofing networks, accelerating quantum readiness, and securing the AI frontier, the strategy provides the strategic clarity necessary to protect our digital way of life from sophisticated adversaries. Palo Alto Networks commends National Cyber Director Sean Cairncross for his leadership and looks forward to working with the administration to operationalize this strategy.

Each pillar of the strategy galvanizes meaningful action to advance our collective defense:

Shape Adversary Behavior (Pillar 1)

This signals a decisive shift toward the proactive disruption of malicious actors. The Trump Administration has made clear that the U.S. Government should impose real costs on adversaries to change their behavior. While the private sector is already executing discrete disruptions against malicious actors, coordination has historically been fragmented. The strategy identifies that increased collaboration with private sector entities, who possess unique insight into adversary behavior, can in turn enable more impactful deterrence.

Promote Common Sense Regulation (Pillar 2)

The strategy appropriately recognizes that complexity is the enemy of security. A focus on measurable improvements in cyber outcomes (versus check-the-box compliance exercises) collectively makes us all safer. While much attention is rightfully paid toward harmonizing incident reporting requirements, which Palo Alto Networks wholeheartedly supports, let’s not stop there. The federal government can lead by example by consolidating and streamlining federal government software compliance certifications. For example, there should be logical reciprocity between FedRAMP High and DoW IL-5 certifications.

Modernize and Secure Federal Government Networks (Pillar 3)

In addition to the necessary attention on AI-powered cyber defense, cloud security and zero trust network architecture, Palo Alto Networks applauds the discrete focus on quantum-safe security ahead of “Q-Day,” the point where quantum computing capabilities will compromise legacy public key encryption that has underpinned cybersecurity for decades. As Federal CISO Mike Duffy recently stated, "Modernization without considering PQC readiness or cryptographic agility is really creating technical debt in the future, something that we don’t want to see ever.”

To address this challenge, Palo Alto Networks provides a structured quantum-safe framework organized into four stages:

• Continuous Discovery – Automating ecosystem ingestion to identify cryptographic dependencies.
• Risk Assessment & Prioritization – Evaluating vulnerabilities to establish a data-driven remediation roadmap.
• Comprehensive Remediation – Executing the transition to post-quantum algorithms across the architecture.
• Governance & Crypto-Hygiene – Maintaining long-term visibility and management.

The bottom line is that 2035 is too late. Quantum readiness must accelerate today, and this strategy will set a critical North Star to drive the necessary urgency.

Secure Critical Infrastructure (Pillar 4)

Critical infrastructure resilience is central to our homeland security, economic security, public health and safety. Unfortunately, critical infrastructure entities are increasingly under assault from emboldened cyber adversaries.

In fact, Palo Alto Networks research shows some form of operational disruption in up to 86% of major cyber incidents. Our 2026 Global Incident Response Report underscores another sobering reality: These entities are under assault from all angles. In 87% of cyber incidents, attacks targeted multiple attack surfaces, which spanned the network, cloud, endpoints and identity.

Recognizing that you can’t secure what you can’t see, we need a national-level effort to identify, prioritize and harden the critical infrastructure that the American people depend upon. This strategy puts an important marker in the ground to revitalize those efforts.

Sustain Superiority in Critical and Emerging Technologies (Pillar 5)

Palo Alto Networks was pleased to see the strategy reinforces the core tenets of the AI Action Plan, emphasizing that "secure-by-design" principles for AI technologies are non-negotiable and that AI adoption and AI security can and must be inexorably linked.

Enterprises should be able to deploy AI confidently without fear of data leakage, model tampering or rogue AI agents. However, despite our research showing an 88% success rate of “jailbreaking” techniques against widely deployed AI models, only 6% of organizations currently have an AI security strategy. It’s time to flip this paradigm and put defenders back in the driver’s seat in this AI-first moment.

To support this emerging consensus around the importance of promoting AI security, we developed the Secure AI by Design Policy Roadmap. This framework provides a four-part construct to evaluate the evolving dimensions of threats to AI systems. Palo Alto Networks is also proud to make its comprehensive AI security suite, Prisma^® AIRS, available to all federal agencies at substantial discounts through GSA’s OneGov Initiative.

Build Talent and Capacity (Pillar 6)

Recognizing America’s cyber workforce as a “strategic asset,” the strategy calls for a pragmatic and accessible pipeline for developing talent. The explicit recognition that we should take advantage of existing avenues across government, industry and academia is important. For example, Palo Alto Networks is proud of the impact of its Cybersecurity Academy – that provides free, NIST Framework-aligned curricula covering essential domains, such as cybersecurity fundamentals, enterprise and network security, cloud security, security operations and the AI/cybersecurity nexus.

Resources like this, and those for other entities, can form the basis of a renewed focus on cyber talent development.

Turning Strategic Vision Into Action

Palo Alto Networks views itself as more than a cybersecurity vendor. We see ourselves as an integrated national security partner of the federal government at a moment when defending our digital way of life demands all of us working together. To that end, we are ready to do our part to turn strategic vision into action.

This strategy should be applauded. Let’s roll up our sleeves and get to work.

The post How the National Cyber Strategy Secures Our Digital Way of Life 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.

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