Jakarta, INTI - Amid the rapid adoption of artificial intelligence (AI), companies now face a new threat in the form of shadow AI, which involves the unauthorized use of AI devices, applications, or integrations.
This activity can allow sensitive data to be accessed on platforms not under the company's official oversight, monitoring, or protection, increasing risks to data security, compliance, and governance.
Cybersecurity company F5 responded to this challenge by launching the F5 AI Security Platform after acquiring SurePath AI. This platform is designed to detect and block unauthorized use of AI in enterprise environments.
SurePath AI acts with its network-based AI discovery technology, which can track the use of unauthorized AI applications in real time without changing companies’ existing application architecture.
According to the State of Application Strategy (SOAS) 2026 report released by F5, 88% of organizations admit to facing operational and security challenges due to the uncontrolled use of AI.
The crisis is intensifying as 98% of global corporations are currently preparing to adopt agentic AI, which is an ecosystem where AI agents can act autonomously, access sensitive data, and execute commands. This development increases the potential for threats such as prompt injection, trade secret leaks, and AI agents acting outside their authority, which can undermine consumer trust.
F5’s Chief Product Officer, Kunal Anand, believes that most current AI security systems are simply an additional layer around chatbots, not a comprehensive security system. He explained that the F5 AI Security Platform provides passive visibility into AI activity to detect shadow AI and control APIs and AI agents across various infrastructure environments.
Addresses AI Risk through Four Integrated Pillars
The integration of F5 and SurePath AI technology delivers protection through four key pillars:
- AI governance: Translate specific risk tolerances, privacy requirements, and regulatory obligations into enforceable boundaries for AI prompts, outputs, tool use, and data access.
- AI discovery: Gain continuous visibility into every AI application, agent, and MCP tool call running across the enterprise, whether sanctioned or not. The platform classifies activity by use case and intent, so teams know not just what is running but why. SurePath AI’s network-based discovery does this passively, with no application-level integration required.
- AI security testing: Stress-test AI systems against more than 140,000 attack patterns from the deepest AI threat database in the industry before those systems reach production, converting findings directly into enforceable defenses.
- AI runtime protection: Define guardrails in plain language and deploy them at the point of interaction, where the platform has demonstrated up to 98.2% security efficacy in independent testing, blocking prompt injection, excessive agent autonomy, and data leakage.
The platform can be deployed across various environments, including on-premises, air-gapped, private cloud, hybrid, and public cloud deployments. This flexibility is considered crucial for industries with stringent regulations regarding data residency and data sovereignty.
Conclusion
F5 addresses the challenge of AI shadow in enterprises with the F5 AI Security Platform, powered by SurePath AI technology, which detects and blocks unauthorized AI use on enterprise networks in real time. The F5 platform relies on four pillars of protection: AI Discovery, AI Governance, AI Security Testing, and AI Runtime Protection. This solution can be deployed across various infrastructures, such as on-premises, air-gapped, private cloud, hybrid, and public cloud deployments.
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