Why F5 joined the Open Secure AI Alliance

Kunal AnandChief Product Officer | F5

AI is changing the economics of both software and security.

Agents can now discover vulnerabilities, write code, invoke tools, call APIs, and act across infrastructure at machine speed. That gives defenders powerful new capabilities. It also means that AI security can no longer stop at the model.

This is why F5 joined NVIDIA and other industry leaders as a member of the Open Secure AI Alliance. The alliance is developing and sharing open technologies, techniques, and tools to help defenders safeguard software and agents in the age of AI.

Security needs an enforcement floor

An AI agent is not simply a language model. It is a system composed of models, instructions, identity, permissions, memory, tools, APIs, guardrails, logs, and evaluation systems. Each layer matters, but the most durable control is the one the agent cannot rewrite, bypass, or even persuade.

I think of this as the enforcement floor: the point where a request is evaluated, and policy is applied outside the requester's control. For AI agents, that floor increasingly sits in the path between the agent and the systems it can reach. An agent’s practical power is determined by what it can call, what data it can access, and what actions it can take.

This is familiar territory for F5.

The Internet became dependable not because every endpoint behaved correctly, but because critical controls were put in place:

• Load balancers managed availability
• Firewalls enforced network policy
• Web application firewalls protected applications

AI agents create the next version of this problem. The control point is shifting again, this time toward the connections among users, applications, APIs, agents, tools, and models.

What F5 brings

F5 has spent decades operating at the critical control points in application and API traffic. For the last couple of years, we have been extending that role into AI.

The F5 AI Security Platform is designed to secure and govern AI applications, models, agents, and the APIs connecting them. We provide model-agnostic testing and runtime protection, visibility into agent actions and tool calls, and deployment options spanning public cloud, private cloud, on-premises, and air-gapped environments.

This matters because most enterprises will not standardize on a single model or provider. They will use different models for different workloads, risk profiles, geographies, and cost structures. It’s likely that their model portfolio will change faster than their applications or security architecture.

Security controls therefore need to survive the model swap. A policy tied to one model must be rebuilt when that model changes. A policy enforced across the application and API path can be applied consistently across models, providers, and deployment environments.

That is the design principle F5 brings to the alliance: secure the interaction, not only the intelligence behind it. We also intend to contribute open research, harnesses, tools, and selected work from across our organization. Our goal is to help the defender community.

Looking ahead

The open-versus-closed argument is too narrow for enterprise security.

The end state is hybrid. Enterprises will use open and closed models, hosted and self-managed systems, general-purpose and specialized models. The real question is whether they can apply a single security posture across all of them, demonstrate that posture to customers and regulators, and change the underlying models without rebuilding controls from scratch.

That is not primarily a question about which model has the highest ceiling. It is a question about whether the system has a trustworthy floor.

F5 joined the Open Secure AI Alliance to help build that floor openly. To learn more, read this blog.

About the Author

Kunal AnandChief Product Officer | F5

Kunal Anand leads the F5 product organization as Chief Product Officer. Responsible for product vision, strategy, and execution, he ensures development of breakthrough solutions that solve critical challenges and create exceptional experiences for customers. In his previous role as Chief Technology and AI Officer, Kunal charted the company’s technology and AI strategy and vision. Prior to F5, Kunal held the dual role of Chief Technology Officer and Chief Information Security Officer at Imperva. His journey to Imperva began in 2018 with the acquisition of Prevoty, an application security startup he co-founded in 2013. Before joining Prevoty, he was the Director of Technology at BBC Worldwide. Kunal has a deep history of innovation and technical expertise, and has held roles leading security, data, technology, and engineering teams at Gravity, MySpace, and the NASA Jet Propulsion Lab. Kunal has over 15 years of experience in AI and machine learning, ranging from model training, employing AI-driven algorithms to enhance products, and designing and implementing AI architectures. Kunal holds a Bachelor of Science degree in computer science from Babson College.

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