F5 Inc. today announced a series of updates to its Application Delivery and Security Platform aimed at helping enterprises secure modern applications, including artificial intelligence workloads and hybrid and multicloud environments.

The announcements, made at the company’s annual AppWorld conference in Las Vegas, include new security capabilities, observability tools and infrastructure improvements designed for emerging AI-driven architectures. The updates are focused on simplifying the management of complex application environments while also addressing new security and operational challenges such as those created by distributed infrastructure and autonomous AI agents.

The first new release today, F5 Insight, offers unified monitoring across applications and infrastructure by combining telemetry and analytics to give operations teams clearer visibility into performance and security issues. Features include predictive analytics and natural-language guidance powered by large language models. As its name suggests, F5 Insight can generate insights and recommendations intended to help teams prioritize remediation and maintain application performance.

On the security front, a new capability called F5 AI Remediate closes the gap between identifying vulnerabilities in AI models and enforcing runtime protections by automating the creation and validation of guardrails designed to mitigate risks discovered during AI model testing. The feature allows security teams to deploy protections faster while keeping human oversight in the process.

The latest version of F5 Distributed Cloud WAF also introduces AI-powered risk scoring designed to replace manual policy tuning. The feature automatically prioritizes threats and enforces outcome-based blocking policies to reduce operational overhead while maintaining low false-positive rates.

The announcements today also see F5 taking on the risk that is rapidly growing as emerging agentic AI systems autonomously interact with applications and services. New enhancements to F5 Distributed Cloud Bot Defense offer more in-depth visibility into traffic patterns to distinguish between humans, bots and AI agents and allow organizations to define policies controlling which automated systems are permitted to interact with their applications.

On the infrastructure side, F5 also today previewed BIG-IP version 21.1, the next release of its long-running application delivery platform. The update includes support for new cryptographic algorithms designed to protect systems against future quantum computing threats as well as security improvements for modern APIs and HTTP/3 traffic. The release also introduces features intended to support AI workloads more efficiently, including session persistence and security protections for Model Context Protocol traffic used by AI agents interacting with services.

F5 also expanded observability capabilities for its NGINX platform to allow inspection of AI agent traffic directly in the application gateway path. The capability allows organizations to monitor how AI agents access APIs and applications, giving developers and operations teams deeper insight into autonomous system behavior.

Finally, the company introduced simplified packaging for its Distributed Cloud Services to streamline adoption of the platform’s capabilities. The new subscription bundles combine services such as content delivery network and API security into fewer product tiers aimed at reducing complexity for customers deploying the platform in SaaS environments.

With the updates, F5 is betting that unified observability, security and delivery services will become essential components of modern enterprise architectures as organizations increasingly rely on distributed infrastructure and autonomous systems.

Photo: F5