Unit 42 is putting the latest frontier cyber models to work across customer environments to find, validate and help remediate the attack paths that matter most.
In May, we introduced Frontier AI Defense with a warning: the window to get ahead of AI-enabled attacks was shorter than most people realized. Since then, we have briefed more than 1,000 security teams around the world and introduced our Frontier AI Defense service to hundreds of customers.
Today, through our partnership with OpenAI, we are expanding Unit 42 Frontier AI Exposure Analysis to put advanced frontier cyber models directly to work in customer environments. Under Unit 42 direction, these models can find exposures, test whether they are exploitable, validate attack paths and help customers prioritize what to fix first.
Our early work shows why this approach matters: 36% of the exposures we identified map to no known CVE, often because they involve multiple gaps that have to be discovered, chained and tested together.
Bringing the Latest Frontier Cyber Capabilities to Defenders
Palo Alto Networks has been among a limited group of organizations with early access to advanced cyber capabilities from the leading frontier AI labs. Through our partnership with OpenAI, Unit 42 can now bring its latest advanced cyber capabilities, including GPT-5.6 Daybreak, to security testing and validation for our customers. Until now, GPT-5.6 Daybreak has not been available for commercial use.
Frontier models have helped inform the work of our experts. Now they can increasingly perform complex offensive security tasks directly, at machine speed and under Unit 42 direction. That allows us to go deeper than traditional vulnerability discovery by testing exploitability, reasoning across multiple weaknesses and determining how an attacker could use them to achieve an objective.
There is no single best model for every cyber task. Our research has shown that different models have different strengths and find vulnerabilities others miss. A multi-model harness routes work to the model best suited for the task, improving efficacy and coverage while managing the cost of frontier AI at scale. As stronger models emerge, we can incorporate them without rebuilding the offering around a single model or provider.
Unit 42 experts remain central to the process. We combine frontier models with our offensive security expertise, Palo Alto Networks telemetry and Unit 42 Threat Intelligence to validate findings, connect exposures into attack paths and understand what an attacker could ultimately achieve.
Built to Find What Attackers Can Exploit
The expanded service brings five capabilities together:
Leading cyber models: Apply the latest advanced cyber models to improve exposure discovery, testing and validation.
Multi-model harness: Use the right model for the right task to improve efficacy, expand coverage and optimize cost.
Exposure discovery: Find vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, leaked credentials, unmanaged attack surface and other posture gaps across applications and network assets.
Advanced adversary simulation: Actively test exploitability and validate end-to-end attack paths to understand how an attacker could compromise the environment.
Custom remediation plan: Prioritize the fixes that break the most important attack paths and feed those findings into existing IT, development and security workflows.
Most security teams already have more findings than they can act on. The harder problem is knowing which ones create a real path to compromise. Attackers look across applications, infrastructure, identity and cloud for weaknesses they can combine to achieve an objective. Frontier AI Exposure Analysis applies that same adversarial perspective, helping defenders understand which paths matter and what to fix first.
The Asymmetry Runs Both Ways Now
For the past several months, frontier AI has been a story about what is coming for defenders: vulnerability discovery at scale, exploit chaining that sees full-stack logic no scanner catches, and attack cycles compressed to seconds from initial access to exfiltration.
All of that is still true. Our answer has been to put everything we learn testing these frontier models into the hands of defenders. Today, that gets more direct: not just what frontier models have taught us, but the models themselves, working in your environment for your defenders before those same capabilities are working for the attacker.
The window is still closing. We intend to spend it building on the side of the defenders.
As organizations race to deploy agentic AI, legacy network security solutions are ill-equipped to keep up, forcing productivity tradeoffs while exposing coverage gaps. At the same time, Frontier AI is proving capable of discovering vulnerabilities and creating exploits in real-time. Navigating this shift requires more than incremental feature enhancements; it requires a bold, market-defining vision backed by relentless customer focused execution.
Today, we’re proud to announce that Gartner® has once again recognized Palo Alto Networks as a Leader in the 2026 Magic Quadrant™ reports for both Security Service Edge and SASE Platforms. This marks the fourth consecutive year that Palo Alto Networks has been recognized, making us the only security vendor to be recognized as a Leader in both reports for four years in a row.
In this year’s Magic Quadrant for SSE, Palo Alto Networks was placed highest in ability to execute and furthest in completeness of vision forPrisma Access.
Every day we focus relentlessly on understanding the needs of our customers and channeling that back into products and services that create real value for them. Our product strategy centers on where our customers' environments and security needs are heading, not just where it sits today.
Vision Matters More than Ever in the AI Era
The AI landscape is changing daily - in this new reality, we strive to be the visionary leaders to serve our customers. GenAI and Agentic AI are exposing enterprises to novel categories of risks like prompt injection, over-privileged agents, and poisoned models. At the same time, Frontier AI is accelerating vulnerability discovery and attack speed resulting inattack timelines being compressed by over 95%.
Gartner projects that by the end of this year,40% of enterprise applications will feature embedded agents, up from less than 5% today. And by 2028, 60% of brands will use agentic AI to facilitate streamlined one-to-one interactions. Operating a business in this new reality requires security architecture engineered to anticipate threats that haven't yet emerged. Success cannot be achieved by retrofitting legacy products with support for AI infrastructure. It demands a unified future-ready foundation that natively secures users, applications, sensitive data, and non-human identities across every touchpoint. The platform enterprises use today determines whether they'll be prepared for tomorrow's threats.
As the cybersecurity landscape undergoes its biggest shift in decades, to us, the Gartner recognition as a Leader on vision and execution across both reports means more than ever before. In our opinion, it not only validates Palo Alto Network’s ability to serve the world’s largest enterprises but also celebrates our strategic product capabilities as shaping the future of cybersecurity through industry leading innovation such as securing AI traffic flows and agents that simplify manageability of SASE operations.
Vision Backed by Relentless Execution
We believe being placed highest in execution and furthest in vision is only as valuable as the ability to execute on it, and Palo Alto Networks has a proven record of creating value for our customers. Our recent milestone of crossing the$1.6 billion ARR mark while growing 40% year over year for Prisma SASE reflects the trust customers have placed in us. Over 6,800 organizations, including over one third of the fortune 500, trust us because we consistently turn market-defining innovation into enterprise-grade reality. Our execution leadership is built on a strong foundation:
Security powered by Precision AI: Our platform delivers universal zero trust through distributed and flexible enforcement points. We inspect traffic as close to the user as possible to ensure that whether your teams are at the corporate HQ, a remote branch, a coffee shop or working from home, they receive the same protection at their precise point of interaction.
Unmatched performance and resilience: By leveraging global hyperscalers, we provide the massive scale and reach that modern organizations require. For specialized, high-performance and sensitive needs, SASE Private Location brings that same cloud-delivered resilience directly to private campuses.
Unified platform: With a truly unified policy engine, data platform and operations, we ensure that as enterprises adapt to the future, our architecture remains an accelerator for secure productivity rather than a bottleneck. We accelerate vendor consolidation for enterprise customers, replacing fragmented legacy point products with a single platform that slashes operational overhead and reduces total cost of ownership (TCO) by up to 50%.
Building for the Future
As the rules of cybersecurity are rewritten in real time, leading the market requires more than following past trends, it requires setting the trajectory. Our aim is to continuously be at the forefront of defining the future of cybersecurity to power the agentic enterprise of tomorrow.
Protecting with AI
Palo Alto Networks continues to innovate to keep enterprises safe at the speed of AI. Our Precision AI security service blocks over 30B threats every single day defeating sophisticated and highly evasive tactics. When combined with our virtual patching and IP defense security services, organizations receive proactive defense that secures at the speed of Frontier AI with flexible enforcement that provides consistent protection everywhere. We are delivering comprehensive security across network, edge, and cloud infrastructure to stop hidden threats that are invisible to traditional networks security solutions.
This AI-powered defense in depth strategy operates across the entire attack lifecycle to enable proactive protection that shifts enterprise security postures from reactive incident response to preemptive defense.
Securing AI
Safely enabling employee adoption of AI tools and agents requires special considerations to mitigate risks around data leaks, intellectual property exposure, and compliance. Prisma SASE and Prisma Access solve these challenges by discovering all AI usage and agentic actions, enforcing granular least privilege access for human and non-human identities, and preventing exposure of risky data to AI and agents. Through AI Access Security™, Prisma SASE provides unified data security across the AI lifecycle by integrating GenAI app visibility and control, real-time prompt analysis, shadow data discovery, and protection on endpoint. Prisma Browser provides a secure AI workspace that safeguards both human and autonomous agent workflows across any LLM by defending against data leaks, prompt injections, and agent hijacking.
To secure the rapid adoption of AI agents by enterprises, Prisma Access will natively integrate with Prisma AIRS AI Gateway to provide a unified LLM, MCP, and A2A gateway giving security teams a single pane of glass for AI observability, cost governance, and runtime inspection.
This innovative approach represents an evolution away from traditional device and user centric fabrics towards an agent-aware platform capable of securing AI for the enterprise of tomorrow, today.
Operating with AI
We continue to invest in capabilities that make our platforms proactive, efficient and easier to use. Our new deployment agents enable customers to onboard their SSE or SASE environment more efficiently, reducing their time to value while increasing productivity. Once onboarded, autonomous AI agents within Strata Cloud Manager continuously evaluate network and security posture to proactively identify configuration drift, performance degradation, and security policy gaps. By uncovering potential disruptions before they impact users or expose the organization to risk we’ve created automated systems capable of finding issues and automatically remediating them, with human-in-the-loop oversight calibrated to the administrator's comfort level, from guided recommendations to full autonomy.
The practical outcome is a dramatic reduction in mean time to resolution (MTTR) and a measurable reduction in total cost of ownership (TCO) while significantly reducing administrative burdens and making Palo Alto Networks products easier to maintain and operate.
Learn More
Download your complimentary copies of the 2026 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ reports to learn why Palo Alto Networks has been recognized as a Leader in both SASE and SSE for the fourth consecutive year.
Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Security Service Edge, 29 July 2026, John Watts Et Al.
Gartner, Magic Quadrant for SASE Platforms, 28 July 2026, By Jonathan Forest Et Al.
Gartner does not endorse any company, vendor, product or service depicted in its publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s business and technology insights organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this publication, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.
Gartner and Magic Quadrant are a trademark of Gartner, Inc., and/or its affiliates.
This graphic was published by Gartner, Inc. as part of a larger research document and should be evaluated in the context of the entire document. The Gartner document is available upon request from Palo Alto Networks.
Palo Alto Networks works closely with OpenAI across our product platform and Unit 42, leveraging advanced frontier model capabilities. Furthermore, we are a partner in the OpenAI Daybreak Cyber Partner Program, working with OpenAI to bring trusted, AI-powered cyber defense to more organizations. Today, we’re announcing native integration of Prisma AIRS Runtime API with OpenAI Codex. This milestone deepens our partnership and drives our shared mission forward: equipping defenders with the industry's most advanced tools.
AI coding assistants have transformed software development, accelerating shipping velocity and changing how engineers solve problems. But as integration of AI coding assistants deepens across development teams, security and compliance teams constantly struggle with enabling developer productivity while helping protect proprietary source code and credentials, and reducing the risk of runtime threats entering the codebase.
Streamlined Security in Minutes
We designed this integration to eliminate complex traffic steering and heavy client-side hooks. Securing your entire developer organization takes just a few clicks inside Codex Enterprise Management UI. Here is how you can enable it:
Retrieve Credentials: Generate your API key and endpoint from the Prisma AIRS management console.
Configure Codex: Paste the Prisma AIRS API key and endpoint directly into your Global Admin Console.
Activate Org-Wide Scanning: Once saved, all user prompts across your entire organization in Codex are automatically routed through the Prisma AIRS Runtime API for real-time inspection.
What Prisma AIRS Brings to OpenAI Codex
By connecting the Codex in ChatGPT for Enterprise workspace to the Prisma AIRS Runtime API, security teams gain comprehensive, automated security controls across two critical vectors:
1. Enterprise Data Loss Prevention (DLP)
Developers frequently paste context – logs, config snippets, or functions – into AI coding assistants. Prisma AIRS scans inputs to help identify sensitive data before it is submitted.
Secrets & Credentials: Intercept API keys, hardcoded passwords, tokens, and private keys.
PII & Financial Data: Automatically detect personally identifiable information and regulated data patterns.
Proprietary Code & IP: Enforce custom pattern rules to help prevent sensitive internal code, architecture details, or trade secrets from being submitted.
2. Advanced Threat & Malicious Code Detection
AI prompts and contextual inputs can contain content that introduces security risks into development workflows. Prisma AIRS Runtime API inspects incoming developer inputs for:
Malicious Code Patterns: Detect obfuscated scripts, dangerous command executions, or known exploit patterns within developer prompts.
Malicious URLs & Links: Flag unverified, phishing, or malicious domain references before they influence generated code or enter internal repos.
Prompt Manipulation Attacks: Detect adversarial inputs that may attempt to bypass system controls or alter model behavior.
Built for DevSecOps Alignment
Security controls only work if developers actually use them. Because the inspection happens at the platform administrative level via API, developers continue working natively in Codex without changing their IDE setup or downloading local hooks. SecOps gain centralized visibility, consistent policy enforcement, and audit-ready logging capabilities across the entire engineering organization, while developers keep the speed and experience they expect.
Key Takeaways
Security as Invisible Infrastructure: Prisma AIRS integrates at the Codex administrative layer, applying security and DLP controls without requiring additional developer workflow changes. Developers can continue working in Codex while security teams maintain centralized policy controls.
Unified Governance for Frontier Models: Prisma AIRS acts as an inline security layer that scans AI traffic in real-time before prompts ever reach the destination model. This architecture can help organizations identify sensitive information moving outward while detecting prompt manipulation and potentially malicious content moving into development workflows. If Prisma AIRS API detects a threat, a block verdict is sent to OpenAI Codex, and the prompt does not reach the destination model or MCP server.
Organization-Wide Compliance: Deployment speed is a strategic advantage, not just an IT convenience. By configuring the Prisma AIRS API within the Global Admin Console, organizations can achieve org-wide governance without complex traffic steering. This can help development teams shift from unmanaged AI use toward more consistent, auditable security practices.
Getting Started
The Prisma AIRS integration helps organizations maintain consistent security controls while preserving the speed and productivity gains of Codex. Organizations can combine Palo Alto Networks’ security capabilities with OpenAI Codex to maintain centralized security and governance controls.
Choose your path forward:
Attending Black Hat 2026: Stop by the Palo Alto Networks booth to check out the Prisma AIRS live demo.
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. 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.
As AI adoption shifts from experimental tools to the business core, enterprises are deploying AI agents and assistants across every department. Developers are accelerating software delivery with Claude Code and business functions are collaborating in Claude.ai, ClaudeCowork, and ClaudeDesign, using Anthropic's Claude to fundamentally rewire how they operate and drive complex, autonomous workflows across their most critical tasks.
Broad AI adoption has forced enterprise security into a difficult paradox: secure the business without stalling innovation. Today, security teams must answer three critical questions: How do we prevent sensitive data from leaking into AI models? How do we intercept runtime attacks, like prompt injection, before they execute? And how do we enforce these guardrails consistently across every AI interaction, in real-time?
Synchronous Governance at the Speed of AI: Enforce critical runtime policy guardrails instantly before model inference occurs. By evaluating every Claude interaction in real-time, security teams can confidently enable high-speed AI innovation without introducing unacceptable risk or operational bottlenecks.
Extending Proven DLP to AI Workflows: Safeguard PII, intellectual property, and proprietary code across all Claude environments (Claude Code, Claude.ai, Claude Cowork) seamlessly. By directly leveraging your organization’s existing enterprise DLP policies, you get consistent, unified data protection without the friction of managing disparate rule sets.
Neutralizing AI-Specific Threats Proactively: Deploy enterprise AI with confidence by intercepting malicious activity before it executes. Proactively block sophisticated runtime threats, including prompt injections, jailbreaks, and toxic inputs, enabling your AI workflows to remain secure and your business operations uninterrupted.
How It Works
Setting up zero-trust governance for your Claude Enterprise environment takes just a few clicks:
Configure Claude Enterprise: In your Claude Enterprise organization settings, navigate to inference hooks, set the hook endpoint URL to your designated Prisma AIRS webhook URL, and include your custom Prisma AIRS API key in the custom headers (x-pan-token).
Activate Cryptographic Verification in Prisma AIRS: Claude generates a unique, one-time signing secret. You simply drop this signing secret into the Prisma AIRS UI.
Prisma AIRS securely stores the signing secret in an encrypted edge Key-Value Map (KVM) to cryptographically verify the authenticity of every incoming request before processing.
Unified Governance Across All Claude Surfaces
Before Claude reads a prompt, Claude POSTs the payload to Prisma AIRS, which evaluates the input against the configured security profile and returns a synchronous allow or deny verdict back to Claude.
Removing the Data Inspection Blind Spot
This Prisma AIRS integration natively leverages the Palo Alto Networks Enterprise DLP engine your organization already runs. Your current policies, custom definitions of "confidential," and compliance dashboards now instantly govern Claude. No redundant rule creation, and no new management overhead. Every prompt is classified in real-time, before anything reaches the model. Data Policy updates reach Claude the moment they reach everything else, and Claude events land in the same dashboards and audit reporting as every other channel. AI stops being the exception to your data protection strategy and becomes just another channel that is covered.
In practice, this helps prevent:
Accidental exposure of PII and regulated data: a Social Security number, card number, or patient record pasted into a prompt is detected on the spot by advanced RegEx patterns and ML classifiers, with Exact Data Matching (EDM) recognizing your actual customer records. When policy requires, Prisma AIRS enforces a deny policy to help keep Claude usage stays aligned with GDPR, HIPAA, and PCI-DSS requirements.
Misuse of credentials in code: Developers working in Claude Code can't inadvertently submit hardcoded API keys, private tokens, or environment credentials into prompt context.
Disclosure of confidential business matters. Document classifiers flag prompts touching M&A, legal, or HR material — even when they contain no identifier a pattern could match.
AI Safety & Runtime Threat Protection
Simultaneously, Prisma AIRS inspects payloads for operational risks specific to large language models:
Prompt Injection & Jailbreak Attacks: Intercepts malicious attempts to manipulate model context or bypass system instructions.
Malicious Code & Malicious URLs: Prevents execution or processing of untrusted scripts and risky links embedded within prompts.
Toxic Content & Topic Guardrails: Enforces compliance with corporate policies and custom business topics.
If a prompt violates your security policy, Prisma AIRS issues a deny verdict. Claude immediately blocks the prompt, optionally presenting a user-facing explanation while returning a unique audit correlation code to your security telemetry dashboards.
Deploy Claude Without the Risk
The Prisma AIRS integration with Claude transforms security from a deployment bottleneck into a business enabler. You no longer have to choose between the operational control of Palo Alto Networks and the cognitive velocity of Claude.
Choose Your Path Forward:
Attending Black Hat 2026? Stop by the Palo Alto Networks booth to check out the Prisma AIRS live demo.
Ready to build? Visit the Prisma AIRS Documentation to connect your Claude inference hooks in minutes.
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. 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.
Modern enterprise security is at a pivotal moment where CIOs and CISOs have a clear opportunity to build a cybersecurity architecture for both today’s environment, and for the future. Doing so requires redefining enterprise resilience across three critical dimensions.
First, Frontier AI driven threat velocity and novelty. Frontier AI models have automated the entire attack lifecycle. Adversaries aren’t just compressing exploit windows to near-zero timelines, they are also generating novel, highly evasive threats at machine speed, bypassing traditional signatures and often before patches are generated.
Second, surging network traffic is overwhelming traditional defenses. Driven by AI workloads, inter-datacenter traffic will nearly triple1 over the next decade dramatically expanding the volume of data teams must inspect and secure.
Finally, major shifts are forcing a “cryptographic reset.” Shrinking certificate lifecycles, internet-scale distrust events, and quantum computers powerful enough to crack public key cryptography are combining to shake the foundation of all digital communications.
Meeting these challenges requires more than incremental fixes. Today, we are proud to introduce PAN-OS 12.2 Ceres, a landmark release representing a major leap forward in network security.
Ceres brings to market 55+ innovations, including three flagship, core capabilities, designed to shift the balance of power back to defenders.
Introducing Frontier Virtual Patching: Preemptive Defense Against Frontier AI Exploits
Today, Palo Alto Networks is giving defenders the ultimate advantage with the launch of Frontier Virtual Patching. By harnessing Frontier AI to discover unknown vulnerabilities, and deploying protections in hours, we are collapsing the exposure window from the industry-average 55 days2 it takes to deploy a traditional patch down into a near-zero window of exposure. This isn’t just about faster patching; it’s about eliminating the attacker’s chance by neutralizing exploits before they ever reach your network.
The new reality: Exploitation far outpaces patch deployment
We’ve built this capability as a collaborative, force-multiplying ecosystem, with our industry partnerships across the enterprise software and OT vendor landscape to accelerate vulnerability disclosure, remediation and customer protection. This includes our collaboration with Project Lightwell, which combines our rapid network-level protection with software remediation to help organizations reduce exposure to emerging threats. We’re also partnering with vulnerability clearinghouses, software maintainers, and industry initiatives to continuously expand a real-time pool of protected vulnerabilities.
This approach builds on recent Unit 42 research, where the autonomous AI system NOVA identified more than 14,000 previously unknown vulnerabilities in just two months – a clear signal that defenders must pair AI-powered discovery with equally fast, coordinated protection. We have built an all-new detection engine, “vaulted protection," that enables us to deliver these rapid protections in a safe and responsible manner.When one participant identifies a threat, the entire ecosystem is protected instantly. Individual discovery becomes global protection.
This is especially valuable for operational technology (OT), critical infrastructure, healthcare, and IoT: environments where systems can’t be taken offline to patch, where patch cycles can stretch for months, and where a single unpatched device can expose an entire network. Frontier Virtual Patching closes that gap in the network, blocking the exploit without applying a patch, rebooting a system, or causing any downtime to critical operations.
Bad actors will lean into Frontier AI to reduce the attack lifecycle from months to minutes. To keep pace, organizations require security partners to match that machine speed. To this end, Palo Alto Networks is raising the bar with its Frontier Virtual Patching, moving beyond compensating controls. By safely and efficiently discovering undisclosed vulnerabilities and deploying protection long before traditional patches can be rolled out, Palo Alto Networks deep security capabilities are flipping network defense from a reactive to proactive operational model.
Will Townsend Chief Analyst, LoneStar Advisory & Research
And for existing Palo Alto Networks network security customers, getting started is effortless. Frontier Virtual Patching is available as a PAN-OS software upgrade with persistent, automatic content updates, so protections keep arriving as new threats emerge, with no new hardware and no manual intervention.
Clearly, Network Security is evolving quickly. Frontier Virtual Patching is part of a huge set of innovations that the team at Palo Alto Networks is delivering in PAN-OS Ceres 12.2 to enable you to stay protected.
Advanced IP Defense: Blocking attacker infrastructure before they can strike
Modern threat actors continuously work to hide their attacks and evade existing controls. Adversaries are increasingly evading traditional perimeter detection of their command-and-control traffic by leveraging direct-to-IP connection techniques that bypass DNS and URL inspection entirely. Attackers are also weaponizing massive proxy networks and hundreds of thousands of residential IP addresses to conduct stealthy, large-scale scanning, brute-force attacks, and exploitation that bypass traditional defenses such as IP reputation and blocklists.
To counter this, Palo Alto Networks is introducing a new preventative solution, Advanced IP Defense, with three powerful new capabilities:
Real-time IP-layer intelligence. We leverage global telemetry from over 70,000 customers to track and block attacker infrastructure inline across the entire attack lifecycle. Our researchers track these threats 24/7, so your team doesn’t have to.
Zero-Trust IP enforcement. We don’t just look at an IP’s past reputation. We verify the intent of the connection itself. By validating that every network connection maps to a legitimate DNS resolution, we provide a critical guardrail against attackers attempting to evade detection.
Powerful IP-layer context. We continuously monitor every connection across more than 40 distinct security attributes, letting you proactively shrink your attack surface and block high-risk traffic from the internet’s “bad neighborhoods” with confidence.
The transition to the Frontier AI era isn't a distant future. It’s happening right now. The organizations that thrive won't be those trying to run old, reactive playbooks faster; they have to scale their defenses to match a whole new velocity of risk. When threats occur at machine speed, relying on human-scale operations is no longer an option. That is why AI and automation are becoming essential tools to meet these challenges head-on.
Varinder Singh CIO, NXP Semiconductors
Network Security Agents: Making admins superhuman
When threats execute in minutes, human-only operations become a bottleneck. To reduce fatigue and accelerate response, we’re launching an elite suite of AI agents for every major role a network administrator performs.
These six specialized AI-powered Network Security Agents, available through Strata Cloud Manager, are trained on your enterprise context and operational workflows. From onboarding and configuration to threat assessment and troubleshooting, they automate the hundreds of routine, repetitive tasks that consume an admin’s day. And you stay in control: for each workflow, you choose the level of oversight that matches your risk tolerance — human-in-the-loop, human-on-the-loop, or human-out-of-the-loop.
Expanding platform protection across every edge
Securing the modern enterprise means extending these AI-powered capabilities across every surface, from data center cores to remote industrial sites, and from custom AI applications to the web browser.
Today we’re introducing PAN-OS Ceres 12.2, which, in addition to the innovations above, expands our platform across five more areas:
Quantum-safe & next-generation trust security. Automates digital certificate lifecycle management and accelerates post-quantum cryptographic readiness, including a cryptographic inventory spanning network security, endpoint, SIEM, and vulnerability management integrations for a complete view of enterprise readiness.
5th-generation ML-optimized hardware. New high-performance PA-Series firewalls equipped with 400G interfaces, and 300 Gbps of threat inspection, and active clustering, these platforms eliminate capacity limits for AI-era data centers. These firewalls also scale to 1.4Tbps of throughput while delivering 5-microsecond latency ensuring peak performance.
Modernized OT & critical infrastructure defense. Purpose-built PA-50R ruggedized 5G firewalls that extend real-time, AI-powered threat prevention to remote, extreme-environment OT networks and critical infrastructure.
AI and agent security. Prisma AIRS is now delivered as a scalable, cloud-native service explicitly engineered to secure AI models, applications, and autonomous agent workflows. The same platform on which we built CloudNGFW has now been extended to provide security for AI with the addition of Prisma AIRS.
Browser-to-firewall integration. Imagine the browser as a secure fast-lane that doesn’t just protect users, it empowers them. By integrating Prisma Browser with our NGFWs, we’ve eliminated the need to decrypt on the endpoint while delivering full Layer 7 protection. This is proactive security that neutralizes threats before they can even touch your network. For security admins, policy is fully unified from device to network, delivering a streamlined, automated experience.
The path forward
We are investing heavily in the innovations you need to defeat today’s threats while future-proofing your enterprise for tomorrow.
The transition to the Frontier AI era demands a bold strategy. The winners will be the organizations that adopt a prevention-first architecture capable of stopping threats long before weaponization occurs. With PAN-OS Ceres 12.2, Palo Alto Networks is giving defenders the speed, scale, and platform foundation to turn the tables on modern adversaries.
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. Any unreleased services or features (and any services or features not generally available to customers) referenced in this or other press releases or public statements are not currently available (or are not yet generally available to customers) and may not be delivered when expected or at all. Customers who purchase Palo Alto Networks applications should make their purchase decisions based on services and features currently generally available.
Join Palo Alto Networks virtual InterSECt 2026 event on Aug. 19–20 to see PAN-OS 12.2 Ceres and learn how to preempt AI-driven network attacks. Secure your spot
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The Future of Vulnerability Discovery Is Here
4,000 projects. 14,000 previously unknown vulnerabilities. Two months. Read Unit 42's latest research on why defenders must prepare for a dramatically faster threat landscape. Read the report
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