Lead Architect

F5 and MuleSoft, a Salesforce company, collaborate to deliver inline security and governance for Agent Fabric and agentic AI applications. F5 announced a technology integration with MuleSoft, bringing F5 AI Guardrails - part of the F5 AI Security Platform - directly into Agent Fabric. As enterprises rapidly scale AI agents and large language model (LLM) applications, this native integration provides security and platform engineering teams with centralized policy enforcement, real-time protection against malicious prompts, and enhanced auditability without re-architecting or replacing the systems already in use. As organizations scale agentic AI capabilities, security teams face a growing governance gap and frequently lack visibility into agentic traffic. They risk exposure from prompt injection, harmful outputs, and sensitive data leakage. The joint integration federates F5's runtime AI security into Agent Fabric's Omni Gateway, enabling enterprises to enforce unified guardrail policies across all prompts and outputs moving through their agentic workflows. Eliminating the governance gap for agentic AI. Until now, organizations deploying Agent Fabric and seeking to leverage F5 AI Guardrails have faced a trade-off: either route LLM traffic through a separate F5 inspection layer, creating additional operational complexity and fragmented telemetry, or rely solely on native gateway controls without extending F5 AI Guardrails policies directly into their MuleSoft-managed workflows. By federating F5 AI Guardrails into Agent Fabric, enterprises gain: * Unified governance and zero double-proxy overhead: Policy management for AI traffic lives in a single control plane. Agent Fabric's Omni Gateway routes LLM calls directly to the F5 AI Guardrails Scan API, inspecting inbound prompts and outbound completions inline before models are invoked or responses returned. * Support for Agentforce ecosystems: Organizations can apply consistent runtime security controls across Agentforce-powered agents, Agent Fabric workflows, and custom AI applications. * Proactive threat mitigation: The solution is designed to block prompt injection, jailbreaks, toxicity, and unauthorized topics while reducing personally identifiable information (PII) and protected data exposure at runtime. * Data residency and sovereign control: Flexible dual-deployment topology allows self-hosted Kubernetes deployments including private VPCs, allowing sensitive prompt and completion data to remain within customer boundaries. * Low-touch policy tuning: Security teams author and version scanners, blocklists, and sensitivity thresholds within the F5 console, which Omni Gateway picks up dynamically without requiring policy or code changes. * SOC back-correlation and compliance auditability: Decisions carry detailed telemetry and shared scan IDs for seamless correlation in the F5 console, simplifying compliance with regulations such as the EU AI Act, GDPR, and HIPAA. "AI agents are moving from experiments into the critical path of the enterprise," said Kunal Anand, Chief Product Officer at F5. "The biggest risk in agentic AI is that agents will move faster than enterprise security and governance models can keep up. By integrating the F5 AI Security Platform directly into Agent Fabric, we are putting protection in the path of every prompt and response, where it can operate in real time. That lets organizations move faster with AI while preserving the control, visibility, and accountability their most important business processes demand." "We built Agent Fabric as the neutral solution to support enterprises running agents across a mix of models and platforms," said Andrew Comstock, SVP & GM at MuleSoft. "By extending Agent Fabric's existing LLM API and AI services to support F5 AI Guardrails as a first-class provider, we're making it even easier for customers to scale their agentic enterprise on the security tooling they know and trust." David Marshall is the founder of VMblog.com, one of the industry's longest-running independent publications covering modern data center technologies. What began as a focus on virtualization and cloud computing has expanded to cover the full spectrum of enterprise IT, including AI, security, and DevOps, making VMblog a trusted destination for vendor news, technology analysis, and industry commentary.Beyond publishing, David has spent his career at the intersection of technology and business, inventing, marketing, and launching a number of successful software companies and products, and building a reputation as a skilled marketing executive in the enterprise IT space.David is also a published author, having written two well-regarded books on virtualization and served as technical editor for two "For Dummies" titles covering virtualization and cloud computing. He co-founded CloudCow.com, a publication focused on cloud computing, and has been named a VMware vExpert every year since 2009, one of the longest continuous honoree streaks in the program's history.Connect with David on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidmarshall/

F5 and MuleSoft have integrated F5 AI Guardrails into Agent Fabric to provide inline security for AI agent applications. The integration addresses growing security challenges as enterprises scale AI deployments, including risks from prompt injection, harmful outputs, and data leakage. The solution enables unified governance without requiring additional infrastructure. Agent Fabric's Omni Gateway routes calls directly to F5's Scan API, inspecting prompts and responses before model invocation. Security teams can manage policies centrally whilst maintaining data residency control through flexible deployment options. The integration supports Agentforce ecosystems and provides threat mitigation against jailbreaks and unauthorized data exposure. It includes compliance features for regulations including the EU AI Act, GDPR, and HIPAA. F5 AI Guardrails for Agent Fabric is now generally available. The companies will demonstrate the integration at Dreamforce in San Francisco from 15-17 September 2026.

F5 has announced enhancements to its AI-powered web application firewall and virtual patching capabilities to combat faster cyber threats driven by frontier AI. The company's WAF for Distributed Cloud now features anomaly detection and agentic threat intelligence, built on technology from its Fletch acquisition. In internal testing, the solution achieved 98% threat detection efficacy whilst reducing false positives to 1%. The system uses real-time machine learning to assign risk scores to each request, defending against zero-day attacks and polymorphic exploits. The platform enables security teams to deploy virtual patches in minutes rather than weeks, giving organisations time to address vulnerabilities without forcing immediate code rewrites. New features include continuous traffic analysis, automated virtual patching, and enhanced infrastructure remediation workflows. The capabilities are now available on F5's Application Delivery and Security Platform.