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F5 has expanded its AI Security Platform with enhanced AI Gateway capabilities that centralise model access, agent governance, and AI guardrails across SaaS, hybrid, and multicloud environments. The upgrade provides enterprises with a single control plane to enforce AI usage policies and track token-level costs, focusing on governance, security, and spend optimisation for production AI workloads. The enhancement builds on F5's June launch of its AI Security Platform, offering a more cohesive solution for enterprises running AI across multiple environments. The move reinforces F5's strategy to position itself as a core control plane for modern, hybrid multicloud and AI-heavy applications. F5's narrative projects $4.2 billion revenue and $1 billion earnings by 2029, requiring 8.1% yearly revenue growth.

F5 unleashes next-generation, agentic-ready AI Gateway to optimise the economics and governance of enterprise AI costs. F5 | Published 19 Aug 2026 Now part of the F5 AI Security Platform, new capabilities provide a unified control point for AI tokenomics, policy enforcement, and security across models, agents, and tools F5 (NASDAQ: FFIV), the global leader in delivering and securing every app and API, today introduced significant enhancements to the F5 AI Gateway and integrated the solution into the F5 AI Security Platform. The enhanced F5 AI Gateway seamlessly enforces policies on every AI request, giving enterprises a unified control plane to govern how AI models, agents, and tools are accessed and used, while optimising the economics of AI at scale. Enterprises have moved past AI experimentation, but governance has not kept pace. AI traffic still moves through a patchwork of standalone proxies and monitoring tools that were never built for AI, with no guardrails in between. According to F5's 2026 State of Application Strategy Report, 77 per cent of organisations say inference, rather than model training or tuning, is now their dominant AI activity, and organisations are managing an average of seven AI models. As inference scales, tokenomics is becoming an increasingly important consideration, with every model request carrying implications for cost, performance, and security. Yet the piecemeal approach to standalone tools to secure AI traffic leaves enterprises without consistent control over how models and agents are accessed and used. "We're watching enterprises race to deploy AI while struggling to control it," said Kunal Anand, Chief Product Officer at F5. "Every AI request carries economic, security, and governance implications, yet most organisations are relying on fragmented tools that address only part of the problem. The result is rising costs, increased risk, and operational complexity. F5 AI Gateway, integrated into the F5 AI Security Platform, provides a single control point for managing AI across models, clouds, agents, and applications. We believe every enterprise will need an intelligent control layer for AI. F5 is building that foundation, helping customers accelerate innovation while maintaining visibility, security, and control." F5 AI Gateway brings three critical functions together in a single integrated solution: * Model Gateway for model access and cost optimisation * MCP Gateway for agent-to-tool governance * AI Guardrails for prompt and response protection Budgets, model routing policies and agent access controls are set once centrally and enforced across distributed environments wherever the models, agents and AI apps run, providing a single operations pane for AI platform ops, AI Security ops and finance teams. Rapid adoption of AI is fuelling the need for AI gateways. According to a recent Gartner(R) report, "AI gateways have emerged as a critical part of AI infrastructure, as enterprises need tools to support safe, efficient and controlled access to AI models and MCP servers. Adoption of AI gateways will continue to accelerate among large enterprises."[1] Bringing AI costs under control Organisations that cannot see which teams, models, and providers are consuming tokens cannot assess the value and costs of using AI. F5 AI Gateway puts tokenomics under control: the Model Gateway function attributes every token by provider, model, team, and user, per-team budgets enforce limits as spend occurs rather than after the invoice arrives; and automated optimisation - smart routing and model tiering, semantic caching, and GPU-aware load balancing - routes each request to the right model at the right cost. The solution is designed to reduce token spend by up to 60 percent, with no application changes. Governing agents and controlling tool access As agents multiply, so do the MCP servers they call, usually with no central registry, no per-tool authorisation, and no record of what agents are doing. The MCP Gateway function of F5 AI Gateway provides fine-grained access controls that limit agents to the resources they are explicitly authorised to use, including APIs, data sources, and RAG systems. A complete audit trail captures what was accessed, when, by which agent, and on whose behalf. MCP server registry gives teams a single source of truth for approved MCP servers, thereby removing friction for developers who would otherwise find it challenging to discover which servers and tools exist. Protecting AI data flows and proving compliance Personal data, health records, and intellectual property move through AI applications every day, and that data usually reaches external models uninspected while injection and jailbreak attempts go undetected. F5 AI Guardrails inspect every prompt and response, redacting sensitive data before it reaches the model, blocking injection and jailbreak attempts, and failing closed when a request cannot be evaluated. Full audit trails, SIEM export, data residency controls, and alignment with SOC 2, ISO, and HIPAA frameworks give regulated industries the evidence they need before putting AI into production. The enforcement point for the F5 AI Security Platform F5 introduced the F5 AI Security Platform earlier this year to give teams continuous visibility, governance, and protection across enterprise AI applications, models, agents, and the APIs connecting them. Four integrated pillars - AI governance, AI usage control, AI security testing, and AI runtime protection - plus an overarching observability layer, create a persistent security lifecycle rather than a one-time compliance exercise. F5 AI Gateway is where those pillars meet live traffic, putting policy into force at the point of interaction and controlling what AI can access, what it can expose, and, crucially, what it can cost the business. F5 AI Gateway is deployable across SaaS, hybrid SaaS, and hybrid multicloud environments, with air-gapped support planned for regulated and sovereign use cases.

F5 placed in the Leader tier of the SecureIQLab 2026 Cloud WAAP v5.0 CyberRisk Validation Comparative Report. * 1 hr ago F5 (NASDAQ: FFIV), the global leader in delivering and securing every app and API, announced that F5 Distributed Cloud Web App and API Protection (WAAP), part of the F5 Application Delivery and Security Platform (ADSP), was placed in the Leader tier of SecureIQLab's 2026 Cloud WAAP v5.0 CyberRisk Validation Comparative Report. F5 was one of a select few evaluated vendors to earn both the Secure-by-Design and Secure-by-Default certifications. HS2 'green' tunnel unveiled F5 in the Leader tier of the SecureIQLab Cloud WAAP v5.0 CyberRisk Validation Comparative Report. Enterprises buying application security products have long faced a trade-off. Some solutions stop sophisticated attacks but demand constant tuning and specialized staff to run. Others deploy easily but leave gaps that only surface after a breach. Security teams end up choosing which problem they would rather have. The SecureIQLab evaluation measured both sides of the efficiency/efficacy trade-off. F5 was placed in the Leader tier of the CyberRisk Ripple - the report's highest classification, reserved for solutions scoring in the top tier for protection and operations. F5 scored 92.7% Security Efficacy and 94.7% Operational Efficiency, exceeding the measured group averages of 86.8% and 93.8%, respectively. "Frontier AI has made traditional security approaches untenable, compressing or inverting the time between vulnerability disclosure and working exploit," said John Maddison, Chief Marketing Officer at F5. "Enterprises are protecting more applications, more APIs, and now more AI - and security that only works when you staff a skilled team around it isn't security that scales." Today's enterprises need a WAAP solution with virtual patching tools such as web application firewall (WAF) capabilities in front of the application - blocking exploitation on day one, without new signatures and without constant tuning. At the same time, modern organizations can't afford to take any single vendor's word for how well their solutions work. Security leaders benefit from independent testing to verify which tools sufficiently provide advertised protections. Protection that holds up under test conditions SecureIQLab subjected each solution to more than 1,600 attack scenarios spanning OWASP web application attacks, API attacks, bot and AI-assisted bot attacks, Layer 7 DoS and DDoS, security resiliency, and a WAAP vulnerability assessment, with legitimate traffic running throughout to measure false positive avoidance. Testing was AMTSO-compliant (Testing Protocol Standard v1.3) under AMTSO Test ID AMTSO-LS1-TP169 and executed on SOCx(R), SecureIQLab's AI-Driven Cloud Security Validation Platform, to ensure consistent execution across vendors. Operations without the drag F5's 94.7% Operational Efficiency score reflects an architecture designed to reduce work rather than create it. F5 Distributed Cloud WAAP fuses WAF, API security, bot defense, and Layer 3-4 and 7 DDoS mitigation into a single-pass inspection architecture, so traffic is decrypted and evaluated once rather than passing between loosely integrated products for inspection and enforcement. Platform teams can deploy and scale policy without stacking latency or configuration overhead, and the same battle-tested WAF engine runs across F5 Distributed Cloud Services, F5 BIG-IP Advanced WAF, and F5 NGINX solutions. Security built in, not bolted on The Secure-by-Design and Secure-by-Default certifications are awarded to solutions that do not expand the attack surface of the environments they protect and that deliver meaningful protection without additional configuration. Earning both requires a score above 85% in each category and a perfect 100% on the WAAP vulnerability assessment. F5 was one of five solutions to clear that bar. F5 also scored above the group average on compliance, a category assessing how effectively a solution supports regulatory, data protection, audit, and governance requirements drawn from frameworks including NIST SP 800-53, the NIST AI Risk Management Framework, ISO/IEC 27001, ISO/IEC 42001, PCI DSS, GDPR, HIPAA, and SOC 2. In addition, F5 scored 100% on the OWASP LLM Top 10 subset in scope for v5.0, which covers two risk categories: Prompt Injection (LLM01:2025) and Improper Output Handling (LLM05:2025). Testing also included 35 benign test cases to measure false positives. "The cloud WAAP market has matured significantly. The group average security score rose roughly 12.3% over the previous edition of this test, and for the first time we scored AI application security as its own category, because that is where the attack surface is expanding," said David Ellis, VP of Research, SecureIQLab. "Solutions placed in the Leader tier demonstrated coverage across web application, API, advanced threat, and AI-enabled application attacks." Supporting materials About the SecureIQLab evaluation SecureIQLab tested the products named in the Cloud WAAP v5.0 CyberRisk Validation Comparative Report on the dates listed in the report methodology section. SecureIQLab does not endorse, certify, warrant, or guarantee the performance or safety of any tested product. Test results reflect performance under the specific methodology and scenarios in that section only. The findings referenced in this release apply to the specific product versions, deployment configurations, and test scenarios listed in the report. Performance under other versions, configurations, or scenarios is not implied. Past performance is not a forecast of future results. F5, Inc. (NASDAQ: FFIV) is the global leader that delivers and secures every app. Backed by three decades of expertise, F5 has built the industry's premier platform - F5 Application Delivery and Security Platform (ADSP) - to deliver and secure every app, every API, anywhere: on-premises, in the cloud, at the edge, and across hybrid, multicloud environments. F5 is committed to innovating and partnering with the world's largest and most advanced organizations to deliver fast, available, and secure digital experiences. Together, Mycarrollcountynews help each other thrive and bring a better digital world to life. 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