Palo Alto tightens guardrails for AI agents

Palo Alto Networks has agreed to acquire Portkey, a Bengaluru-founded AI infrastructure startup, as the cybersecurity group pushes further into securing autonomous software agents now moving from pilot projects into business-critical systems.

The Santa Clara-based company said the deal is expected to close in its fourth quarter of fiscal 2026, subject to customary conditions. Financial terms were not disclosed, though market estimates place Portkey’s potential valuation at about $140 million, roughly twice the level implied by its latest funding round. The acquisition will fold Portkey’s AI gateway technology into Palo Alto Networks’ Prisma AIRS platform, creating a central control layer for monitoring, routing and securing AI traffic across enterprises.

Portkey, founded in 2023 by Rohit Agarwal and Ayush Garg, has built a platform that sits between enterprise applications and large language models. Its gateway lets companies manage access, observe usage, enforce policies, control costs and apply guardrails across AI models and agent workflows. The company says its infrastructure already processes trillions of tokens each month, underscoring the scale at which corporate AI systems are beginning to operate.

The deal reflects a sharp shift in cybersecurity priorities. Enterprises that began with chatbots and internal productivity tools are now testing AI agents that can search databases, write code, open tickets, trigger payments, retrieve documents and communicate with other agents. That makes them more powerful than conventional software assistants, but also more difficult to govern. A poorly configured agent can expose confidential data, misuse credentials, violate compliance rules or take unintended actions before human operators notice.

Palo Alto Networks is positioning Portkey’s technology as a gateway for this new layer of machine-to-machine activity. The objective is to give security teams a single point from which they can inspect AI requests, apply policy, trace model interactions and identify anomalous behaviour. Such controls are becoming more important as companies use multiple model providers, cloud platforms and internal data sources rather than relying on one tightly managed AI stack.

Portkey’s appeal lies partly in its role as operational infrastructure rather than a narrow security add-on. Its platform supports access to more than 1,600 models through a unified interface and includes observability, fallbacks, caching, budget controls, rate limits and governance tools. For security vendors, these functions are valuable because the gateway sits directly in the path of AI activity, giving it visibility into prompts, responses, tool calls and model-routing decisions.

The acquisition also strengthens Palo Alto Networks’ campaign to broaden its platform beyond traditional network defence. Under chief executive Nikesh Arora, the company has pursued a consolidation strategy built around cloud security, identity, endpoint protection, threat intelligence and AI-enabled operations. Its completed acquisition of CyberArk added privileged access and identity capabilities covering human, machine and agentic identities, while other platform investments have targeted cloud monitoring and automated incident response.

Portkey’s integration with Prisma AIRS is designed to extend that strategy into the runtime layer of AI applications. Prisma AIRS focuses on securing AI models, applications and agents, covering risks such as prompt injection, data leakage, unsafe model behaviour and compromised workflows. Portkey adds the traffic-management layer needed to apply those protections consistently across different AI deployments.

The timing is significant for the wider cybersecurity market. AI security has become one of the most active acquisition areas as enterprises try to close the gap between fast AI adoption and slower-moving governance systems. Startups focused on AI model testing, data protection, agent permissions, secure orchestration and machine identity have drawn strong investor interest, while large vendors are racing to package these capabilities into broader platforms.

For Palo Alto Networks, the challenge will be execution. Integrating a fast-moving developer infrastructure company into a large security platform can create product overlap, sales complexity and customer concerns over openness. Portkey has gained traction partly because developers can use it across many model providers and workflows. Maintaining that neutrality while embedding the technology deeper into Prisma AIRS will be central to preserving its appeal.