F5 AI Guardrails vs Harmonic Security

F5 AI Guardrails is F5's runtime security product for AI models, applications and agents. F5 sells it alongside F5 AI Red Team, its automated adversarial testing product, and presents the two as a pair: findings from Red Team can be turned into guardrail policies. Both come from CalypsoAI, the AI security company F5 announced it would acquire on September 11, 2025 for $180 million in purchase consideration, mostly cash. The deal closed on September 26, 2025. F5 introduced both products when it announced the deal had closed, and made them generally available in January 2026 as part of its Application Delivery and Security Platform. F5, Inc. was incorporated in 1996 and is based in Seattle; this profile lists the company's founding year and headquarters, as the directory does for other big-company products. F5 AI Guardrails blocks prompt injection and jailbreaks, detects and prevents leakage of personal data and custom data categories, filters toxic or harmful output, and audits or blocks unauthorized tool calls and actions by agents. Policies can be written in natural language. Every enforcement action is logged with attribution, and logs can be exported to third-party SIEMs. It works with any model and runs in AWS, Azure or Google Cloud, in private clouds, or on premises, including fully air-gapped environments. F5 AI Red Team sends a swarm of attacker agents to run static, prompt-based and multi-turn attacks, including indirect prompt injection and data-leakage tests on RAG applications. F5 says its attack library grows by more than 10,000 patterns a month. Red Team runs in the major public clouds or on premises as a certified Red Hat OpenShift operator. A feature called F5 AI Remediate drafts guardrails from Red Team findings, and a person approves each one before it goes live. **Gateway and platform** On June 22, 2026 F5 launched the F5 AI Security Platform, which groups AI governance, AI discovery, testing with AI Red Team and runtime protection with AI Guardrails, plus an audit trail across AI interactions. At the same time it announced the acquisition of SurePath AI, which adds network-based discovery of AI use, including shadow AI. F5's AI Gateway now combines a model gateway, an MCP gateway (with an MCP server registry and per-tool allow and deny controls) and AI Guardrails under one control plane. **Compliance coverage** F5 says Guardrails has automated auditing templates for GDPR, HIPAA and the EU AI Act, out-of-the-box policy controls aligned to PCI, PHI and the EU AI Act's prohibited-risk categories, and audit-ready logs. It also says Red Team findings can support compliance programs aligned with the NIST AI RMF and the EU AI Act, and it publishes an infographic aligning its products with the OWASP Top 10 for LLMs. We found no article-by-article mapping to the EU AI Act. **Who it's for** Large enterprises, including regulated financial services and healthcare organizations, that need AI guardrails they can host themselves or run air-gapped. F5 says both products are deployed at Fortune 500 companies. It also suits F5 customers who want AI controls on the same platform as their application delivery and API security.

Harmonic Security sells software that shows security teams how employees and AI agents use generative AI tools and stops sensitive data from going into them. It was founded in 2023 (its About page dates the founding to August 2023) by CEO Alastair Paterson, the former chief executive of Digital Shadows, and CTO Bryan Woolgar-O'Neil. It launched in October 2023, jointly headquartered in London and San Francisco, and its privacy policy names Harmonic Security Limited in London and Harmonic Security Inc. in San Francisco. It says it has raised $76 million in total: a $7 million seed round led by Ten Eleven Ventures (October 2023), a $17.5 million Series A led by Next47 (October 2024) and a $50 million Series B led by Crosspoint Capital Partners, announced on October 14, 2026, when it reported more than 100 customers and more than 90 staff in the US and UK. We found no acquisition. The platform is sold as three packages. Explore uses a browser extension to find the AI tools in use and gives prompt-level visibility, usage intelligence, sensitive data detection and risk scores for each app; Harmonic says it covers more than 1,000 AI applications, including AI features inside SaaS tools. Guide adds an endpoint agent for desktop AI apps, IDEs and command-line tools such as Claude Code and Codex, inline coaching (block, warn or log), granular policies and webhook alerts for SIEM and SOAR tools. Command adds MCP client and server discovery, permissions on what agents may read, write and execute, and data protection inside agentic workflows; prompt injection detection is listed as coming soon. Its locally installed MCP Gateway, launched in October 2025, intercepts MCP traffic on Windows, macOS and Linux. Instead of pattern matching, Harmonic classifies prompts with its own small language models, which it says decide in under 200 milliseconds. **AI compliance coverage** Harmonic treats compliance as a by-product of governance. Its compliance page says it flags high-risk uses such as automated hiring screens and credit scoring "so you can apply the specific guardrails the EU AI Act and local laws require", keeps an audit trail of AI interactions, and blocks health and personal data from unapproved AI tools for HIPAA and GDPR. Documentation mapping its controls to specific regulations is available on request, as is EU hosting. For Harmonic itself, its trust center lists SOC 2 Type 2 and ISO/IEC 27001:2022, with a SOC 2 report available on request, and its site footer shows SOC 2 Type 2 and ISO 27001 badges. ISO/IEC 42001 and the NIST AI RMF also appear in the trust center's list, but the site shows no badge or certification claim for either. **Who it's for** Security and IT teams that want to let staff use ChatGPT, Claude, Copilot, Cursor and similar tools while keeping company data out of them. Harmonic has industry pages for technology, legal, insurance and healthcare, and its site quotes customers at Apax and Advisor360.