F5 AI Guardrails vs Prisma AIRS

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.

Prisma AIRS is Palo Alto Networks' platform for securing AI applications, agents, models and data. Palo Alto Networks launched it on April 28, 2025, the same day it announced its intent to acquire Protect AI, a Seattle AI security company, and completed that acquisition on July 22, 2025. Prisma AIRS 2.0, released October 28, 2025, "completes the native integration" of Protect AI, and Protect AI's chief executive, Ian Swanson, joined as VP, Product, Prisma AIRS. The protectai.com site now redirects to the Prisma AIRS page, and the README of Protect AI's open-source LLM Guard library says the project has been archived. Palo Alto Networks was incorporated in 2005 and is based in Santa Clara; this profile lists the company's founding year and headquarters, as the directory does for other big-company products. Palo Alto's fiscal 2026 annual report lists six parts: AI Gateway, Agent Security, AI Red Teaming, AI Runtime Security, AI Model Security (labeled AI Supply Chain Security on the current product page) and AI Posture Management. AI Runtime Security comes in two forms. API Intercept is called from application code through a REST API to scan prompts and model responses. Network Intercept inspects cloud network traffic inline and is managed from Strata Cloud Manager or Panorama. The platform supports AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, Kubernetes, private clouds and on-premises infrastructure. AI Red Teaming tests agentic and non-agentic systems with a library of more than 500 attack vectors across 50+ techniques and produces a risk score. AI Model Security scans models for tampering, malicious code, data poisoning, architectural backdoors and unsafe serialization formats. **Agent security** The product page now adds Agent Identity Security and Agentic Endpoint Security. Palo Alto completed its acquisition of Koi, which adds agentic endpoint security, in April 2026. On May 29, 2026 it completed its acquisition of Portkey, whose gateway becomes the core AI Gateway for Prisma AIRS: it routes, monitors and secures traffic between agents and models. **Frameworks** Palo Alto maps AI Red Teaming attacks to the OWASP Top 10 for LLMs, MITRE ATLAS and what it calls the NIST Risk Management Framework. We found no documented support for the EU AI Act or ISO 42001. **Who it's for** Enterprises, especially existing Palo Alto Networks customers on Strata Cloud Manager, that want model scanning, red teaming and runtime protection funded from the same credit pool as their software firewalls.