Palo Alto Networks Named "Company to Beat" in AI Security for Second Consecutive Year

For the second consecutive year, Palo Alto Networks is recognized as a current Company to Beat in the June 2026 Gartner® AI Vendor Race: Palo Alto Networks Is the Company to Beat in AI Security Platforms. This designation validates our strategic focus on Prisma AIRS, our comprehensive AI Security Platform designed to secure the AI lifecycle end-to-end.

In their analysis, at the moment, Gartner identified three core drivers behind our market position:

• “Strategic acquisitions of Portkey, Koi Security, Chronosphere and CyberArk give Palo Alto Networks distinct capabilities that broaden the coverage within the AI security platform, specifically in agentic AI Security, AI Gateway governance and IAM for AI agents.”
• “Palo Alto Networks’ large installed base and distribution channels offer an advantage and enable cross-selling and upselling opportunities for its AI security platform within its customer base and partner ecosystem.”
• “Palo Alto Networks has integrated earlier acquisitions to enable an AI security control plane through its Prisma AIRS platform, addressing early buyer requirements for broad AI security use cases including AI agents.”

As organizations rapidly deploy AI, our objective is to provide the continuous innovation and rapid engineering velocity required to help customers deliver safe, trusted, and secure AI that power their businesses.

Empowering Secure AI Adoption

The primary challenge for CIOs and CISOs is maintaining operational control while accelerating AI deployment. While standalone point solutions continue to emerge, Prisma AIRS differentiates itself by offering comprehensive depth across the full AI lifecycle, backed by an established footprint across millions of networks, endpoints, and cloud environments.

Prisma AIRS addresses critical AI security risks by enabling organizations to:

• Discover all AI applications and agents deployed across customer environments.
• Assess and test the AI supply chain and agent behaviors for risk before they enter production.
• Protect AI applications and agent interactions with real-time, automated threat prevention.

These capabilities are delivered enterprise-ready and meet the needs of the most complex customer environments and solution patterns.

Evolving the Platform: Continuous Innovation for the Agentic Era

Since the last Gartner report, we have significantly advanced our capabilities with new products and features to secure the agentic enterprise.

When introduced, Prisma AIRS focused primarily on securing AI applications. Today, autonomous agents represent the new frontier. Prisma AIRS now extends coverage across the entire agentic ecosystem—from discovering shadow agents across cloud and SaaS environments, to assessing agent behavior through multi-agent red teaming, to enforcing runtime control via centralized AI gateways.

Broad coverage is essential for AI security. A platform is needed to truly secure AI and over the past year we have made some remarkable acquisitions and have integrated these technologies: 

• Portkey delivers a centralized control plane for multi-agent governance, observability, identity and security. 
• Koi secures the agentic endpoint with full visibility & control over AI artifacts.
• Idira (built on the foundation of our CyberArk acquisition) provides a next-generation identity platform for AI agent access and authorization.
• Chronosphere enhances our observability layer, allowing enterprises to ingest and analyze high-fidelity AI and agent interaction data at scale.

To complement our products and enable us to secure AI from novel risks, research is critical. Benefiting from early access to frontier models from Anthropic and OpenAI, Unit 42 launched a dedicated service helping customers remediate model-level vulnerabilities at scale. Additionally, our Huntr threat research community—comprising 20,000+ researchers—actively exposes novel security risks, from model file vulnerabilities to runtime exploits, directly fueling Prisma AIRS product defenses.

Addressing Market Challenges

Gartner's analysis also highlighted valid industry challenges. We have actively addressed these factors:

• Integration Complexity: Consolidating platforms can risk creating fragmented user experiences. To ensure simplicity, we have unified our AI security controls within Strata Cloud Manager. This provides a single, seamless entry point to manage Prisma AIRS, enabling end-to-end security without operational friction.
• Crowded Market: With many AI security startups emerging, point solutions continue to fragment the market. However, securing an autonomous enterprise requires systemic context rather than isolated tools. Prisma AIRS delivers a cohesive platform where individual capabilities work together across all AI deployment patterns, offering both deep technical features and broad capabilities that secure the entire AI lifecycle.
• Native Controls: Rather than competing with cloud providers or AI services, Prisma AIRS complements them. Our platform provides unified visibility, consistent policies, and advanced protections across the fragmented, multi-cloud environments where enterprises actually operate. Many leading cloud service providers, software vendors, and frontier model companies are partners that feature native hooks into our AI security architectures.

The Race Continues

Being recognized as the company to beat validates our current momentum, but it is not a finish line. The AI enterprise is continuously evolving, agentic workloads will continue to evolve, and risks will shift. Our commitment remains unchanged: to listen to our customers, invest heavily in platform capabilities, and deliver predictable security outcomes.

Organizations that succeed with AI will be those that refuse to compromise safety for speed.

We thank Gartner for this recognition and express our sincere gratitude to our customers for their ongoing trust and partnership. Palo Alto Networks remains committed to driving relentless innovation and serving as your partner of choice to secure the enterprise AI landscape.

Let's build the future of secure AI together.

To review the complete market analysis, read the full Gartner report: "AI Vendor Race: Palo Alto Networks Is the Company to Beat in AI Security Platforms, Mark Wah, Neil MacDonald, Marissa Schmidt, Dennis Xu, Evan Zeng, 17 June 2026"

For additional reading, discover how to implement AI trust, risk and security management (TRiSM) principles.

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