Palo Alto Networks has updated its cloud security platform with a focus on agentic AI.

The latest version of the Cortex Cloud platform includes Cortex AgentiX, a suite of AI agents targeting security across email, endpoints, and the network, alongside a threat intelligence agent. These agents can be deployed from any Cortex application, with more to be added, while AgentiX itself also offers users a no-code agent building solution.

The suite was claimed to be trained on 1.2 billion real-world playbook executions and comes with over 1,000 prebuilt integrations. It also offers native support for model context protocol (MCP), the increasingly influential integration standard for AI agents with possible implications for network governance and traffic management.

Away from AgentiX, Cortex Cloud 2.0 has been updated with a refreshed Command Center promising insights into cloud assets, critical risks, and active threats. It also offers a performance-optimized mode of Cortex Cloud’s cloud detection and response (CDR) agent, which Palo Alto claimed can be deployed with one click, while halving processing consumption compared to previous iterations.

AIRS' AI registry

In addition, Palo Alto updated Prisma AIRS (AI Runtime Security), touting an agent registry in its AI security tool, which monitors the ecosphere for new and existing AI agents. An automated red team tool, meanwhile, scouts out for vulnerabilities in enterprise AI systems.

Prisma AIRS has also been updated with an AI model security, capable of assessing open-source models to find potential architectural vulnerabilities, malicious code, and data contamination.

The updates follow Cortex’s recent addition of an application security posture management (ASPM) tool, in an example of shift-left security, which sees security testing deployed sooner in the software and application development phase.

Palo Alto’s firewall OS was also updated recently with a new Cloud and AI Risk Assessment to find risks related to insufficient or missing security measures.

The refresh enabled automatic deployment of software and cloud-based firewalls, alongside instances of Prisma AIRS, with the cloud infrastructure configured to direct network traffic, including through a secure multi-cloud network mesh.