Palo Alto Networks announced plans to acquire AI Gateway startup Portkey as the cybersecurity giant ramps up efforts to secure autonomous AI agents increasingly being deployed by enterprises.

The California-based cybersecurity firm said Portkey’s technology will become the AI Gateway for Prisma AIRS, serving as a centralized control plane designed to monitor, route and secure AI transactions across enterprise systems.

The move comes as companies shift from AI copilots and applications toward autonomous AI agents capable of making decisions and interacting with internal and external systems with minimal human intervention.

“As autonomous agents join the enterprise workforce, they also become a new, unmanaged attack surface,” said Lee Klarich, chief product and technology officer of Palo Alto Networks. “By integrating Portkey into Prisma AIRS, organizations 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,” he added.

According to Palo Alto Networks, Portkey already processes trillions of AI tokens monthly while maintaining low-latency performance required for agent-to-agent communication.

The company said the acquisition is intended to help enterprises address growing concerns over AI security, governance, operational reliability, and compliance as AI systems gain broader access to sensitive business processes.

Palo Alto Networks said the combined platform is designed to secure AI interactions through runtime threat inspection and governance controls while enforcing strict identity security policies for AI workloads.

The platform also aims to provide 99.99 percent uptime for autonomous AI workloads through semantic routing and automated failover systems, alongside telemetry and audit logs for monitoring AI activity.

Portkey chief executive officer and co-founder Rohit Agarwal said the partnership would allow enterprises to scale AI deployments without sacrificing security oversight.

“Scaling AI in production requires a delicate balance between total flexibility for developers and absolute control for security teams,” Agarwal said. “By joining Palo Alto Networks, we will establish the AI Gateway as the foundational layer of the secure AI enterprise,” he added.