AI agents are crossing an important threshold.

They are moving from assistants that respond to us to autonomous systems that reason, plan, and act on our behalf. They can write and execute code, access enterprise data, call tools and APIs, and keep working toward a goal with limited human intervention.

That changes the security model.

An autonomous agent is designed to find a way to accomplish its objective. If one path is blocked, it reasons about another. That is what makes agents powerful, and it is why models’ built-in prompt guardrails alone are not enough.

The harness can guide what an agent should do. Security must control what an agent can do. That requires security authority outside the agent itself.

Palo Alto Networks and NVIDIA Team Up to Secure Agentic AI

NVIDIA provides the accelerated computing platform, secure runtime foundation, and reference system design for agentic AI. Palo Alto Networks brings the AI security capabilities enterprises need to govern interactions, protect workloads, and control identity and access.

Together, we are extending security across three areas: AI governance with Prisma AIRS AI Gateway, runtime protection with Prisma AIRS AI Runtime Security, and Agent Identity Security powered by IDIRA.

This is the focus of our expanded collaboration with NVIDIA on the NVIDIA Open Agent Safety Platform reference design.

a) Prisma AIRS AI Gateway on NVIDIA Vera CPU

Our forward-looking architecture includes Prisma AIRS AI Gateway software running on NVIDIA Vera CPU systems, bringing AI governance and enforcement closer to infrastructure designed for agentic workloads.

The AI Gateway is the real-time enforcement point for AI Governance, Runtime, and Identity security. It continuously verifies agent identities, enforces strict least-privilege access, redacts sensitive data before it is exposed, and deeply inspects every interaction—stopping unauthorized actions before they ever reach critical host systems or cloud endpoints.

• Operationalize AI agents: Connect applications and agents to thousands of models and tools through one control point, with the reliability and flexibility to scale AI across the enterprise.
• Track usage and control costs: Monitor every AI interaction across your company to see exactly what teams are doing, track your spending, and restrict access to approved tools only.
• Enforce agent security across the enterprise: Block sensitive data exposure and malicious commands in real time, and verify agent identity before actions are taken.

b) Announcing Prisma AIRS AI Runtime Security on NVIDIA BlueField

The Palo Alto Networks AI Runtime firewall running natively on NVIDIA BlueField DPUs extends Zero Trust protection to the front-end network traffic of the AI factory and to the AI Edge, creating a tamper-proof boundary immune to application-layer attacks. Drawing on the NVIDIA Sentry reference design, Prisma AIRS AI Runtime Security accelerated on NVIDIA BlueField delivers: 

• Hardware-Isolated Boundaries: Tamper-proof boundary, ensuring a compromised model or a rogue agent can never bypass runtime controls.
• Agentless Behavioral Introspection: Monitor agent execution paths, memory structures, and tool calls with NVIDIA DOCA Argus with zero CPU overhead, and feed real-time telemetry directly into Cortex XSIAM for automated observation, analysis, and remediation.
• Zero Trust Governance: Strict least-privilege access is enforced across the network and external APIs by default, delivering a verifiable audit trail for every allow and block action.

c) IDIRA Agent Identity Security

As agents gain greater autonomy, identity becomes fundamental to controlling what they can access and what actions they can take.

Looking ahead, we plan to integrate NVIDIA OpenShell with upcoming Agent Identity Security capabilities from Idira, including identity and secrets management for the OpenShell sandbox and agent identity broker service on NVIDIA BlueField. This will help organizations apply identity-based controls and least-privilege access to agents without relying on persistent human credentials.

The Path Ahead: Security at Scale for Enterprise Agents

As agents become more autonomous, governance must extend to identity. Prisma AIRS AI Gateway will also serve as an enforcement point for Agent Identity Security powered by IDIRA. We are also expanding to include Agent Identity Broker support directly on NVIDIA BlueField, providing identity verification and access governance independently of the host environment.

Together, these capabilities are designed to prevent unauthorized execution, reduce standing access, and stop privilege escalation as agents interact with enterprise systems.

As agents gain more autonomy, enterprises need consistent control over how they connect and what they can access.

Our work with NVIDIA brings those controls closer to where agentic workloads run, while Palo Alto Networks provides the security policy, governance, and enforcement enterprises need to manage them. 

To learn more about our GA of AI Runtime Security on the BlueField DPU, read our blog — Palo Alto Networks Announces Support for NVIDIA Enterprise AI Factory.

The next phase of AI will be defined not only by what agents can do, but by whether enterprises can trust them to operate safely at scale.

Palo Alto Networks was named a Market Shaper in AI application security. Read the report: Gartner® Emerging Market Quadrant for AI Application Security – Established Vendors, September 2026.

The post Securing AI Agents at Scale with NVIDIA appeared first on Palo Alto Networks Blog.

Cybersecurity is in the middle of a generational shift. AI has disrupted a 30-year balance of power between defenders and adversaries.

Armed with agentic AI tools and open-weight models stripped of safety guardrails, threat actors are discovering, validating, and chaining exposures at machine speed. In a recent Unit 42 investigation, the attacker used more than 50 MITRE ATT&CK techniques to reduce weeks of methodical intrusion tradecraft into less than 10 hours—97% faster than a skilled red team could have done. Time-to-exfiltration has compressed to under an hour in real-world attacks. And when new CVEs are publicly disclosed, automated adversary scanners are weaponizing them within 15 minutes.

Defending at human speed is no longer viable. Organizations must close years of accumulated exposure while securing the AI they are rapidly adopting. That demands action on five fronts: continuously find and fix vulnerabilities, reduce exposure, secure AI infrastructure, unify attack prevention, and automate detection and response at machine speed.

Today, we are announcing Unit 42 Continuous Frontier AI Defense to put the first two priorities into practice. Powered by Anthropic's Mythos models and OpenAI's latest GPT cyber models, this always-on, agentic service combines our offensive security experts with proprietary multi-model harnesses to discover vulnerabilities, validate real-world exploitability, and accelerate remediation across applications, identities, cloud infrastructure, and network assets.

Led by our offensive security experts, this service discovers, validates and remediates exposures before they can be exploited. We use proprietary AI harnesses and gated capability models—powerful models restricted from public use—to discover vulnerabilities, prove real-world exploitability, and accelerate remediation across applications, identities, cloud infrastructure, and network assets as an organization’s environment changes.

Continuous Frontier AI Defense builds on Unit 42’s Frontier AI Defense, which launched in April and introduced Frontier AI Exposure Analysis, a point-in-time exposure analysis, and a security blueprint that benchmarks current capabilities to help organizations modernize their cybersecurity systems. In August, Unit 42 expanded the list of frontier AI models to include  OpenAI’s GPT-5.6-Cyber and Anthropic's Claude Mythos 5, giving organizations access to additional AI capabilities.

A Single AI Model Is Not a Security Strategy

Frontier models are powerful, but no single AI model is a cybersecurity silver bullet and the models require equally powerful AI scanning harnesses.

Unit 42 research evaluation of model performance across enterprise codebases and live environments revealed two stark operational realities:

• Coverage caps: No single AI model catches more than 40% of vulnerabilities in a complex environment.
• Visibility: Leading cyber models such as Anthropic Claude Mythos 5 and OpenAI GPT-5.6-Cyber have less than 10% overlap in the exposures they identify.

To solve the single model gaps, Continuous Frontier AI Defense runs on proprietary multi-model harnesses. These harnesses act as an intelligent orchestration layer, routing specific offensive testing tasks to the model best suited for the job. This approach aligns model strengths, eliminates individual gaps, and keeps compute spend economical.

We combine these frontier models with Unit 42 threat intelligence, and frontline security expertise to turn raw vulnerability data into verified, actionable protection. Zero Data Retention (ZDR) architectures protect enterprise source code and telemetry, so customer data is never retained or used to train public models.

What Happens When AI Meets Real Enterprise Architecture

We did not build this service on theoretical assumptions. We built and validated it internally  across Palo Alto Networks and across more than 100 customer engagements.

During our internal deployment, continuous Mythos-based scanning achieved over a year’s worth of traditional penetration testing results in just three weeks. The harness identified 3.2 times more high and critical vulnerabilities per product than legacy testing methods, and helped engineering teams cut mean time to remediate by 51%.

When we executed the service across customer environments, the frontline data delivered a clear warning:

• Hidden exposures: In third-party applications, two out of three validated exposures had no known CVE. Vulnerability-only scanners will never see them.
• High severity: 37% of identified exposures rated high or critical in severity.
• Chained attack paths: Flaws rarely existed in isolation. In one financial sector engagement, our harness identified a sequence of individually minor flaws: an application payment link that failed to re-verify identity, a skipped one-time password check, and a session routing flaw. Chained together, an attacker could achieve complete account takeover and payment fraud without any victim action.

Moving from Discovery to Validated Protection

Finding weaknesses without fixing them only creates noise. And, security teams do not lack findings; they already have more alerts than they can act on. The bigger challenge is knowing which weaknesses an attacker can actually exploit and chain into a viable path to compromise, and then remediating them.

Unit 42 Continuous Frontier AI Defense translates findings directly into risk reduction:

• Continuous Testing Engine: Provides a full-estate baseline scan followed by always-on testing as an organization’s environment changes.
• Multi-Model AI Harness: Unit 42 deploys proprietary multi-model harnesses, the software architecture to route work to the model best suited for the task, improving efficacy and coverage while managing the cost of frontier AI at scale.
• Leading Cyber Models: The harnesses are built around gated capability models, including Anthropic Claude Mythos 5 and OpenAI GPT-5.6-Cyber, as well as open weight models. 
• Advanced Adversary Simulation: Proves real-world exploitability by validating end-to-end attack paths across first- and third-party web apps, APIs, cloud infrastructure, source code repositories, and network assets.
• Accelerated Remediation: Delivers actionable and prioritized fixes, code-level guidance, and virtual patch recommendations. To implement virtual patches before vulnerabilities are publicly disclosed or official patches exist, organizations can pair this with Frontier Virtual Patching. 

Unit 42 Continuous Frontier AI Defense is available worldwide today on an annual subscription basis. Register for our upcoming virtual Threat Briefing to see how we apply Frontier AI, our proprietary multi-model harness, and offensive security expertise to protect Palo Alto Networks and our customers.

To learn more about Unit 42 Continuous Frontier AI Defense, register for the upcoming Virtual Threat Briefing here.

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

Securing Every Environment at the Speed of Frontier AI

Recognized as a Leader for the second consecutive time and positioned furthest for Completeness of Vision. Palo Alto Networks is advancing hybrid mesh firewall with one integrated platform for preemptive protection, agentic operations, AI runtime security and quantum-safe security across the enterprise.

 

We are proud to share that Palo Alto Networks has been named a Leader in the 2026 Gartner® Magic Quadrant for Hybrid Mesh Firewall for the second consecutive time, and positioned furthest for Completeness of Vision.

We believe this recognition reflects the strength of our approach to network security: one natively integrated platform that delivers consistent protection, policy and operations across every environment.

It also comes at a pivotal moment for cybersecurity. Frontier AI is collapsing the time between vulnerability discovery and exploitation. AI applications and agents are creating new infrastructure and data risks. At the same time, the cryptographic reset is forcing enterprises to rethink how they establish and maintain digital trust.

Fragmented firewall architectures and manual security operations were never designed for this speed, scale or complexity, and can no longer keep pace.

One Platform Across Every Environment

Hybrid environments have traditionally required organizations to deploy and manage different security products across data centers, clouds, branches, campuses and remote users. The result is often fragmented policy, inconsistent protection and operational complexity.

Palo Alto Networks transforms hybrid mesh firewall from a collection of enforcement products into a unified, intelligent security platform, powered by Precision AI.

The  Strata Network Security Platform is our Hybrid Mesh Firewall, spanning hardware  (PA-Series), virtual (VM-Series), cloud-native (Cloud NGFW) and firewall-as-a-service (SASE) deployments with consistent policy, shared intelligence and threat prevention across environments. 

Strata Cloud Manager provides unified policy, visibility and AI-driven operations across these enforcement points. Beyond traditional firewall environments, the platform extends protection to the browser with Prisma Browser and to AI applications, models and agents with Prisma AIRS®.

Cloud-delivered security services, including Advanced Threat Prevention, Advanced WildFire, Advanced URL Filtering, and Advanced DNS Security deliver consistent, inline prevention across environments. Intelligence discovered in one part of the platform can strengthen protection everywhere, turning every enforcement point into a real-time prevention layer.

If you’re new to the concept of HMF, explore our primer on What Is a Hybrid Mesh Firewall and Why It Matters.

The Hybrid Mesh Firewall Market Is Evolving

Gartner’s 2026 Hybrid Mesh Firewall research describes a market moving toward more automated, intelligence-driven security platforms as organizations manage increasingly complex hybrid environments. 

The report identifies several trends shaping the evolution of hybrid mesh firewall, including the growing adoption of cloud-based management, AI-driven threat prevention, automation through LLM-based assistants, post-quantum cryptography and security capabilities for AI applications and workloads.

As these requirements evolve, organizations need a network security architecture that can deliver consistent protection and operations across hybrid environments while preparing for emerging AI and quantum-era risks.

Advancing Hybrid Mesh Firewall for the Frontier AI Era

Against this backdrop, Palo Alto Networks continues to advance the Strata Network Security Platform for the Frontier AI era.

Preempt attacks earlier: Advanced Threat Prevention Plus uses Frontier AI-powered vulnerability discovery and Frontier Virtual Patching to deliver preemptive protections, including before vulnerabilities are publicly disclosed or official patches are available.

Disrupt attacker infrastructure: Advanced IP Defense continuously identifies, validates and blocks attacker-controlled infrastructure in real time - even when adversaries use direct-to-IP communications, proprietary encryption, residential proxies or trusted cloud infrastructure to evade traditional security signals.

Operate at machine speed: Six purpose-built Network Security Agents in Strata Cloud Manager assist teams with deployment, troubleshooting, configuration management, posture optimization, threat investigation and data protection, with built-in guardrails and human oversight.

Secure AI and modernize digital trust: Prisma AIRS helps secure AI applications, models and agents across the AI lifecycle, while Quantum-Safe Security and Next-Generation Trust Security help organizations identify cryptographic risk and modernize digital trust. Read more about Palo Alto Networks’ approach to securing AI.

Together, these capabilities help organizations reduce exposure before attacks succeed, operate at machine speed, secure AI infrastructure and modernize digital trust for the post-quantum era.

Proven Security, Performance and Scale

A unified platform must deliver not only breadth, but also effective protection and reliable performance under demanding conditions.

Independent SecureIQLab testing demonstrated 99% security efficacy, with Palo Alto Networks scoring approximately 20 points higher than the next-best tested vendor. Miercom validation demonstrated up to 2–8 times higher AI traffic throughput, along with strong TLS inspection and stable performance under sustained load.

More than 75,000 organizations around the world rely on Palo Alto Networks to consolidate security, improve visibility and reduce risk across their hybrid environments.

This global scale provides intelligence that continuously strengthens the platform. Every attempted attack expands what the platform can learn, and every new detection can become protection for all customers.

Defining the Future of Hybrid Mesh Firewall

We believe being named a Leader for the second consecutive time reinforces our conviction in an integrated platform that delivers consistent prevention and operations everywhere an enterprise operates.

But we believe industry leadership is also about preparing customers for what comes next.

As Frontier AI accelerates attacks, autonomous systems reshape security operations and quantum risk changes the foundations of digital trust, enterprises need more than a collection of firewalls. They need an intelligent security platform that can transform shared intelligence into prevention across every environment.

Palo Alto Networks is building that future, helping organizations reduce exposure before attacks succeed, operate at machine speed, secure AI infrastructure and modernize digital trust for the post-quantum era.

Download the 2026 Gartner® Magic Quadrant for Hybrid Mesh Firewall to learn more about why Palo Alto Networks was named a Leader.

 

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Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Hybrid Mesh Firewall, 7 September 2026

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