AI is changing the way applications are built, connected, and attacked. Organizations are deploying AI-powered applications, experimenting with agents, connecting services through emerging protocols such as Model Context Protocol, or MCP, and exposing more APIs across distributed environments. These innovations create new opportunities for productivity and growth, but they also introduce new blind spots across application estates that are becoming harder to see, govern, and protect.
Attackers are moving just as quickly. They are using automation and AI-assisted techniques to discover, analyze, weaponize, and exploit vulnerabilities faster. For security teams, the challenge is no longer just protecting more applications. It is understanding what exists, identifying what matters most, and acting with confidence across increasingly complex environments.
The newest release of F5 Distributed Cloud Services introduces enhanced capabilities to help organizations improve visibility into APIs and AI-connected services, accelerate security operations with AI-assisted workflows, strengthen protection against emerging threats, and simplify application delivery and operations.
Visibility comes before protection
As organizations embrace AI-powered applications and services, one of the first challenges is understanding what exists.
New APIs appear continuously. AI-connected services introduce additional endpoints and interactions. Application architectures become more distributed. Before security teams can effectively govern or protect these environments, they need visibility.
To help teams understand what they are protecting, this release introduces AI-powered API attribute tagging, which automatically classifies discovered endpoints by business function and identifies MCP-connected endpoints associated with AI-specific traffic. This gives security teams more than a list of endpoints. It also gives them context they can use to understand which APIs support important business functions, where AI-connected traffic exists, and where governance or protection may need attention.
Additional enhancements improve security misconfiguration detection and expand API security visibility across dashboards, helping organizations identify misconfigurations, discover shadow APIs, and better understand risk across their application estate.
Agentic threat intelligence in Distributed Cloud Services helps security teams find the risks that need attention first. It combines real-time threat monitoring, open-source intelligence, CVE intelligence, security analytics, and intelligent correlation to surface high-priority risks faster, so teams can focus less on sorting through signals and more on improving defenses.
Together, these capabilities help security teams identify high-priority risks faster and apply protection with greater confidence.
These innovations build on many of the AI-powered capabilities already available across Distributed Cloud Services. From intelligent risk scoring that helps organizations prioritize vulnerability mitigation and strengthen virtual patching decisions, to advanced behavioral analytics that help identify malicious users and suspicious activity across a broad threat landscape, F5 continues to advance the use of AI to help security teams reduce risk and improve operational efficiency. AI-powered API classification and agentic threat intelligence are the latest additions to this growing set of capabilities, extending how organizations discover, understand, and secure modern applications, APIs, and AI-connected services.
Looking ahead
AI security is still in its early stages, but the direction is clear: security teams will need deeper visibility, faster decision-making, stronger intelligence, and simpler ways to operate at scale. The latest release of Distributed Cloud Services advances those priorities with new capabilities for API and AI-connected service visibility, AI-assisted security workflows, and agentic threat intelligence. As application environments continue to evolve, organizations will need security capabilities that can adapt just as quickly.
To learn more, visit the F5 Distributed Cloud Services webpage to see how F5 is helping organizations secure the next generation of applications, APIs, and AI-powered experiences.
About the Author
Related Blog Posts
Securing F5 NGINX in the age of AI
How F5 is applying AI-driven security practices across the F5 NGINX portfolio to help deliver safer, more resilient software.
From dashboard fatigue to operational excellence: Why XOps needs F5 Insight for ADSP
Learn how F5 Insight for ADSP lays the visibility foundation for XOps—turning fragmented signals across applications and infrastructure into actionable intelligence.
The hidden cost of unmanaged AI infrastructure
AI platforms don’t lose value because of models. They lose value because of instability. See how intelligent traffic management improves token throughput while protecting expensive GPU infrastructure.
Govern your AI present and anticipate your AI future
Learn from our field CISO, Chuck Herrin, how to prepare for the new challenge of securing AI models and agents.
F5 recognized as one of the Emerging Visionaries in the Emerging Market Quadrant of the 2025 Gartner® Innovation Guide for Generative AI Engineering
We’re excited to share that F5 has been recognized in 2025 Gartner Emerging Market Quadrant(eMQ) for Generative AI Engineering.
Self-Hosting vs. Models-as-a-Service: The Runtime Security Tradeoff
As GenAI systems continue to move from experimental pilots to enterprise-wide deployments, one architectural choice carries significant weight: how will your organization deploy runtime-based capabilities?