Palo Alto Networks to Acquire Portkey to Secure Rise of AI Agents

Palo Alto Networks®, the global cybersecurity leader, has announced its intent to acquire Portkey, a pioneer in Artificial Intelligence (AI) Gateways. Portkey delivers a critical centralised control plane to manage and protect autonomous AI agents, already processing trillions of tokens per month with the low latency required for agent‑to‑agent communication. By ensuring that security governance never comes at the expense of developer speed, Portkey allows enterprises to accelerate AI innovation with confidence.

As adoption in the enterprise expands from copilots and AI applications to autonomous agents, the AI security gap has significantly widened. These agents act as highly privileged insiders, executing a large volume of automated decisions across internal and external systems. To help organisations address this challenge, Portkey will serve as the AI Gateway for Prisma® AIRS™, acting as the central nervous system that can monitor, route, and secure every AI transaction across the enterprise.

Lee Klarich, Chief Product & Technology Officer of Palo Alto Networks, said: “As autonomous agents join the enterprise workforce, they also become a new, unmanaged attack surface. By integrating Portkey into Prisma AIRS, organisations will be able to confidently deploy and govern AI agents. With Portkey, we are providing enterprises with visibility into all their agentic traffic, and enabling them to control and protect against agentic threats.”

Control Plane for AI Agents

Fragmented security tools have forced a choice between innovation and safety. By establishing Portkey as the AI Gateway for Prisma AIRS, Palo Alto Networks is eliminating that trade‑off. The unified architecture allows organisations to move autonomous workloads into production with built‑in security, reliability, and management, designed to:

• Secure AI Interactions. Following the close of the transaction, Portkey will be the AI Gateway for Prisma AIRS, inspecting AI traffic and enforcing security and governance policies for prevention at runtime, to identify threats and safeguard data. By enforcing AI Identity Security, it will apply strict least‑privilege controls to every agent interaction, ensuring all AI workloads remain secure and compliant.
• Ensure Mission‑Critical Reliability. Organisations can achieve 99.99% uptime for autonomous workloads through semantic routing and automated failovers, ensuring peak performance at scale. This reliability is paired with deep technical telemetry and audit logs, providing real‑time visibility and governance required to inspect every AI interaction.
• Global AI Governance. Centralised artefact management allows seamless versioning and secure access control across all AI models, agents, and MCP servers, transforming fragmented AI experiments into a disciplined, global production engine. In addition, organisations can eliminate “bill shock” and reduce operational costs through caching techniques and granular quotas, while accessing over 3,000 LLMs and MCP tools via a unified interface.

Rohit Agarwal, CEO and Co‑Founder of Portkey, noted: “Scaling AI in production requires a delicate balance between total flexibility for developers and absolute control for security teams. By joining Palo Alto Networks, we will establish the AI Gateway as the foundational layer of the secure AI enterprise. Together, we will provide the infrastructure that allows every organisation to deploy autonomous agents with the confidence that their data and operations are fully protected.”

Following the close, Palo Alto Networks will continue to support existing and new Portkey customers, who will also benefit from tighter integration with Prisma AIRS as part of a comprehensive AI Security platform. Subject to customary closing conditions, the transaction is expected to close in Palo Alto Networks’ fourth quarter of fiscal 2026.

Learn more about Palo Alto Networks’ intent to acquire Portkey.

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