Securing AI: Behind Palo Alto Networks' Portkey Acquisition

Standing at the dawn of the autonomous agentic enterprise era, the insider threat risk now has highly-privileged machine form. 

To mitigate the threat, cybersecurity leader Palo Alto Networks has revealed plans to acquire AI gateway specialist Portkey. The deal is reflective of the growing urgency among organisations as they scramble to keep autonomous AI agent risks at bay, amid rapid deployment in day to day operations.

In most enterprises, AI agents operate with a high level of autonomy, making decisions and interacting across systems carrying sensitive data with minimal human oversight, creating a new and largely unprotected attack surface – one that existing security frameworks struggle to address.

“As autonomous agents join the enterprise workforce, they also become a new, unmanaged attack surface,” says Lee Klarich, Chief Product & Technology Officer of Palo Alto Networks.

“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.”

A unified control plane for AI agents

Portkey’s technology acts as a centralised control layer for AI systems, that governs without impeding development speed. 

This gateway is designed to monitor, route and secure every AI interaction, effectively becoming the backbone of Palo Alto Networks’ Prisma AIRS platform.

Portkey’s infrastructure already processes trillions of tokens each month with low latency, making it well suited to handle real time agent to agent communication. Once integrated, it will enable enterprises to enforce security policies at runtime, apply least privilege access controls and maintain compliance across all AI driven workflows.

“AI agents have become privileged insiders, reasoning and executing on behalf of users and companies,” notes Nikesh Arora, Chairman and CEO at Palo Alto Networks. “With that power comes a new category of risk. You cannot build an agentic enterprise without a centralised control plane to secure it. 

“Portkey is a pioneer of AI Gateways technology. Their platform is battle-tested at scale, processing trillions of tokens per month.

“By integrating Portkey into our Prisma AIRS following closing, we are delivering the industry’s first unified enforcement layer to manage and secure every AI app and agent across the enterprise. 

Reliability and governance at enterprise scale

Beyond security, the integration promises to deliver high levels of reliability and operational visibility. 

Portkey's unique features like semantic routing and automated failover allows organisations to maintain uptime of up to 99.99% – a necessity to keep the mission critical AI workloads up and running.

The platform also introduces advanced telemetry and audit logging, giving teams the ability to track and inspect every AI transaction in real time.

Global AI governance, achieved through centralised management of models, agents and supporting tools, allows organisations to move from fragmented experimentation to structured production. 

So as not to burn a hole in the enterprise budget, Portkey enables caching and quota systems that help to avoid unexpected spikes in usage while maintaining access to a wide ecosystem of AI models.

Portkey’s vision for a secure AI future

For Portkey, the acquisition represents an opportunity to scale its vision within a broader security ecosystem. 

The company’s leadership sees the partnership as a way to establish the AI gateway as a foundational layer for modern enterprises.

Rohit Agarwal, CEO and Co-Founder of Portkey, comments: "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 completion of the deal, expected in the fourth quarter of fiscal 2026, Palo Alto Networks will continue supporting Portkey’s existing customers while integrating its capabilities into Prisma AIRS. 

While the financial details were not disclosed by the companies, an Economic Times report suggests that Portkey may be valued between US$120-140m, which is double the valuation the company had in February 2026.  

The move positions the company to play a central role in shaping how enterprises secure and govern AI at scale.