F5 named Market Shaper in Gartner AI security quadrant

F5 has been named a Market Shaper in Gartner's inaugural Emerging Market Quadrant for AI Application Security, one of two vendors placed in that position.

The designation comes as companies race to secure AI systems increasingly deployed across corporate networks, application interfaces and autonomous software agents. Gartner assessed vendors in the category on their potential for market disruption and execution.

F5 said the recognition reflects its work in securing AI applications across cloud, on-premises and air-gapped environments. It argued that AI security is moving beyond narrow tools aimed at a single layer of the stack, as businesses seek broader oversight of models, applications, APIs, data access and the actions of AI agents.

F5's own research points to the scale of the issue. In its 2026 State of Application Strategy Report, 88 per cent of organisations said they had already encountered at least one AI-related operational or security challenge, while 98 per cent said they were preparing for agentic AI.

Growing demand

F5 also reported rising customer demand for its AI security products. In its third-quarter fiscal 2026 earnings results, the company said the number of customers buying its AI security offerings doubled from the previous quarter.

That growth comes as more organisations move AI workloads from experimental settings into regulated and operational environments. Banks, telecoms operators, governments and other large users are under pressure to monitor how AI models are accessed, what data they can reach and what actions automated agents are allowed to take.

F5 said its approach focuses on the network and application layers, where requests to AI models, agent actions and machine-to-machine connections can be observed and controlled. This, it said, gives security teams visibility into AI use, including unauthorised or "shadow AI", without requiring application integrations or code changes.

The vendor highlighted two products in particular. F5 AI Guardrails recorded up to 98.4 per cent security efficacy in independent testing, while F5 AI Red Team tests AI systems against more than 140,000 attack patterns and turns the findings into runtime defences, according to the company.

Executive view

John Maddison, Chief Marketing Officer at F5, said enterprise adoption of AI had changed the security challenge.

"Enterprises are not running AI in a lab. They are running it inside regulated networks, behind APIs, and across agents that authenticate and act on their own," Maddison said.

He said many suppliers in the market remained focused on only part of the problem.

"Enterprises cannot assemble a security posture from dozens of disparate point products. More than 40 vendors are competing to secure enterprise AI, and most are solving one slice of the problem. In our view, F5's positioning in the Market Shapers quadrant offers confirmation of a straightforward conviction: security leaders cannot govern what they cannot see, and AI cannot be secured from the outside in. F5 secures AI where enterprises actually run it," Maddison said.

The wider market for AI security is still taking shape, with providers spanning application security, model testing, governance software, API protection and infrastructure controls. As businesses put more autonomous systems into live use, vendors are competing to show they can manage not only model safety but also the practical risks tied to deployment, identity, data access and monitoring.

F5 said those demands were especially important in sectors with strict regulatory, sovereignty and data residency requirements. Air-gapped and on-premises environments remain significant for public sector bodies and heavily regulated industries, which often cannot move sensitive workloads fully into public cloud settings.

Maddison said the market was likely to favour suppliers that can operate in those environments and at large scale.

"The AI application security market is going to consolidate around vendors who can operate at enterprise scale, in regulated environments, with real traffic and real consequences," Maddison said. "F5's 30 years of experience in these demanding environments gives our customers the foundation to confidently and securely build for the future with AI."