F5 recognized as a Market Shaper in the September 2026 Gartner® Emerging Market Quadrant™ for AI application security

John MaddisonChief Marketing Officer | F5

Gartner recognized F5 as one of only two Market Shapers in its inaugural Emerging Market Quadrant (eMQ) for AI Application Security, which we feel is underscoring the groundbreaking work our organization has been doing to shape the F5 AI Security Platform into the most adaptable solution for large enterprise AI deployments.

Gartner describes vendors in the Market Shapers quadrant as follows: “Vendors in this quadrant are shaping the industry. They are building comprehensive platforms by acquiring innovative companies and introducing centralized management tools for AI workflows.”

F5 is one of only two vendors recognized by Gartner as a Market Shaper.

Why we believe F5's position is significant

The Emerging Market Quadrant is data-driven research that gives buyers a visual snapshot of vendors in a new, fast-moving market. Placement is absolute, based on scoring, rather than relative to other vendors as in a Magic Quadrant.

The AI Application Security emerging Market Quadrant plots vendors along two axes: “Potential for Market Disruption” and “Potential to Execute.” It’s our understanding that disruption assesses whether a vendor's approach can change how the market works, while execution looks at whether the vendor can deliver at enterprise scale.

A vendor can score well on one and poorly on the other. In our view, F5 was rated highly on both. We believe this placement reflects our comprehensive approach to AI security capabilities spanning discovery, testing, governance, and runtime protection across the enterprise AI deployment lifecycle.

How F5 is shaping the AI security market

This past year marked a pivotal expansion of our AI security strategy. With the introduction of the F5 AI Security Platform, we combined continuous AI governance, AI discovery, AI security testing, AI runtime protection, and AI observability into a single adaptive loop—spanning generative and agentic AI alike. Through our acquisition of SurePath AI, we added network-based discovery and intent classification to surface risky AI usage across the workforce.

These solutions work as a closed loop, rapidly customized to each customer’s unique business, security, and regulatory demands. F5 AI Red Team finds the gaps, F5 AI Guardrails enforces against them, and F5 AI Remediate automates the handoff. In operation, that means turning a weeks-long process into a matter of minutes during a time when AI-enabled and agentic attackers hold the speed advantage. Every finding becomes a control, and every control gets tested as the landscape evolves. We believe that core loop and how quickly we close it is what contributed to F5’s placement as a Market Shaper.

Where AI runs matters as much as what it does

The second half of the Gartner evaluation is "Potential to Execute," and this is where we feel F5 held an advantage before the new market ever formed. For more than 30 years, F5 has served the largest financial institutions, healthcare systems, service providers, and government agencies in the world. We know from experience across every technology shift that our customers will always need freedom in how and where they deploy.

We built AI security for that reality from Day One. The F5 AI Security Platform tests and protects critical workloads entirely within customer-controlled environments. For customers with exceptionally low risk appetites, F5 AI Guardrails and F5 AI Red Team run in fully air-gapped deployments, executing locally with no outbound calls to F5 or any third-party cloud service.

Customers get the same controls and policy model wherever the workload lives. For customers navigating data residency and digital sovereignty requirements, that is often the first question asked, and the one that ends most evaluations early.

Ready for where the market is headed

This market is young, but it is tasked with addressing the critical challenges every enterprise faces. This includes securing not just traditional AI applications, but now agents that hold their own identities, call other agents, and act without a human in the loop. Securing that traffic is the work in front of every enterprise, and it is what keeps F5 in a continual posture of experimentation and innovation.

To learn more, download the full report from Gartner.

Gartner, Emerging Market Quadrant for AI Application Security — Established Vendors, By Meghan Hollis et. al, 14 September 2026

Gartner does not endorse any company, vendor, product or service depicted in its publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s business and technology insights organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this publication, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

This graphic was published by Gartner, Inc. as part of a larger research document and should be evaluated in the context of the entire document. The Gartner document is available upon request from F5.

About the Author

John MaddisonChief Marketing Officer | F5

John Maddison is F5’s Chief Marketing Officer. John has more than 30 years of experience leading product teams and corporate marketing functions in cybersecurity, cloud, and telecommunications. Prior to F5, John spent 12 years at Fortinet, most recently as Chief Marketing Officer and EVP of Product Strategy. He previously held leadership positions at Trend Micro, Vina Communications, and Octel Communications. John holds a B.S. in Engineering degree from Plymouth University in Devon, England.

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