Who can you trust in the age of AI agents?

Nirav ShahSVP, Product and Solution Marketing | F5

In the rush to adopt AI, many organizations are concentrating on the capabilities of autonomous agents. Yet an even more crucial question is arising: How do you determine which AI agents, users, and devices to trust, and to what extent?

As AI agents increasingly interact with websites, mobile apps, and APIs on consumers' behalf, the traditional distinction between human and automated traffic is disappearing. Customers are using AI-powered shopping assistants, travel planners, and financial advisors to complete transactions, while cybercriminals use the same technologies to automate fraud, account abuse, and large-scale data harvesting.

This shift represents a new challenge for security leaders. For years, application security has centered on analyzing individual requests and determining whether traffic looks legitimate. But modern digital interactions, and therefore modern attacks, rarely exist in isolation. Malicious actors rotate IP addresses, use residential proxy networks, leverage real devices, and blend human activity with automation. AI agents further blur the line, behaving much like legitimate users while operating at machine speed.

To help address these issues, F5 is launching two significant enhancements to F5 Distributed Cloud Bot Defense, part of the F5 Application Delivery and Security Platform (ADSP). Device intelligence functionality extends Distributed Cloud Bot Defense with multi-signal risk decisioning that combines behavioral, device, and client integrity signals to drive real-time decisions about what to trust. New agentic AI protections help users to classify and manage humans, bots, AI agents, and legitimate automation, all within a single policy framework. Together, these new capabilities give enterprises the control they need to let in trusted AI traffic while blocking automated fraud and abuse.

As AI agents increasingly become an emerging channel for customer interaction, organizations need a smarter way to distinguish trusted automation from fraud and abuse. By combining device intelligence with agent-aware protections in F5 Distributed Cloud Bot Defense, organizations can establish continuous trust across users, devices, bots, and AI agents. Device intelligence provides persistent device context and risk insights, while Distributed Cloud Bot Defense applies real-time policy decisions to allow trusted interactions, challenge suspicious activity, and stop malicious automation. Together, they help enterprises protect customer-facing applications and APIs, while safely enabling new AI-driven experiences.

As AI agents become a new and growing digital commerce channel, consumer-facing organizations such as retailers, banks, and travel providers must enable trusted automation while protecting against fraud, account takeover, credential abuse, and malicious bots. By combining device intelligence capabilities with the agent-aware protections of F5 Distributed Cloud Bot Defense, organizations can establish continuous trust across consumers, devices, bots, and AI agents.

Device intelligence delivers persistent device context and risk insights, while Distributed Cloud Bot Defense enforces real-time policy decisions to allow trusted interactions, challenge suspicious activity, and block malicious automation. With these combined capabilities, organizations can better protect revenue, preserve customer trust, and deliver secure digital experiences, while safely supporting the next generation of AI-driven, agent-based commerce.

The new reality: Establishing trust across humans, bots, and AI agents

Digital threats are no longer defined by simple bots executing repetitive scripts. Digital interactions are becoming increasingly difficult to classify. Human users, automated clients, and AI agents now interact with applications and APIs using many of the same behaviors, making traditional methods of distinguishing legitimate activity from malicious automation less effective.

As organizations embrace AI-driven experiences, the challenge is no longer simply identifying bots. It's determining which users, devices, bots, and AI agents can be trusted.

Device intelligence: A new trust layer for F5 Distributed Cloud Bot Defense

Device intelligence functionality offers the deep, persistent device-level visibility needed to uncover sophisticated abuse that traditional security tools miss. It is a powerful, optional addition to F5 Distributed Cloud Bot Defense that helps you protect your business by establishing a durable understanding of every device at all times.

Device intelligence extends Distributed Cloud Bot Defense with device-level risk insights.

Deep, persistent device-level visibility

With device intelligence, organizations get the deep, persistent device-level visibility needed to uncover sophisticated abuse that traditional security tools miss. It is a powerful addition to F5 Distributed Cloud Bot Defense that helps you protect your business by establishing a durable understanding of every device at all times.

Key capabilities for your security strategy include:

• Persistent device identification: Device intelligence generates a highly resilient and stable identifier for each device. This enables tracking of a specific device across multiple sessions, browsers, and IP addresses, even when an attacker attempts to conceal their tracks.
• Real-time risk scoring: Before a high-risk transaction is ever processed, device intelligence evaluates the device's posture, generating an explainable risk score. This enables immediate, automated enforcement actions without affecting legitimate users.
• Comprehensive account protection: Device intelligence maps the relationships between devices and user accounts over time. This mapping exposes coordinated attacks, such as when a single device accesses hundreds of accounts (a sign of account takeover) or when a single account is accessed by an unusual number of devices (indicating account sharing or fraud).

Specialized protections for the agentic AI era

While device intelligence establishes trust in devices, the new agentic AI protections in Distributed Cloud Bot Defense help organizations gain trust in the growing ecosystem of AI-powered agents interacting with their digital properties.

Unlike traditional bots, AI agents can autonomously navigate applications, make decisions, interact directly with APIs, and complete complex multi-step workflows on behalf of users. Many will be legitimate and valuable. Others may be unmanaged, unauthorized, or malicious. The challenge is not establishing whether traffic is automated, but rather determining how much to trust that automation.

F5 Distributed Cloud Bot Defense enables tracking, classifying, and control of AI agents with granular policy enforcement.

F5's specialized agentic AI protections introduce an agent-aware policy framework within F5 ADSP that allows organizations to detect, identify, and manage humans, trusted AI agents, legitimate automation, unknown automated clients, and malicious bots within a single security model. Rather than relying solely on user-agent strings or static identifiers, F5 evaluates behavioral patterns, device intelligence, client integrity, and interaction telemetry to make more informed trust decisions.

This enables organizations to safely embrace emerging AI-driven business models, such as agentic commerce. Approved AI shopping assistants can search sites, fill a shopping cart, and complete transactions. Policy controls can govern resource-intensive automation. Meanwhile, suspicious or unverified agents can be challenged, rate-limited, or blocked before they consume resources, access sensitive information, or facilitate fraud.

Perhaps most importantly, these capabilities help organizations avoid the false choice between blocking or allowing all AI traffic. Instead, they establish trusted interactions, apply governance, and maintain control while enabling organizations to innovate.

The future of digital trust

The future of application security will not be defined by determining whether traffic is human or machine generated. It will be defined by understanding the entity behind every interaction and deciding how much trust it deserves.

With device intelligence and specialized agentic AI protections, F5 is helping organizations move beyond request-level analysis to establish continuous trust across users, devices, applications, APIs, and AI agents. As digital engagement continues to evolve, that ability to make intelligent trust decisions will become a critical business advantage.

The strategic imperative for device-centric security

The addition of device intelligence and enhanced agentic AI protections to F5 Distributed Cloud Bot Defense marks a critical evolution in application security. By providing persistent, device-centric intelligence and making it easy to discover, classify, and manage AI agents, F5 empowers you to protect your business from the most advanced threats. These enhancements help you reduce fraud, lower operational costs, and build a foundation of trust that lets you pursue new digital initiatives with confidence.

To learn more, visit the F5 Distributed Cloud Bot Defense webpage or contact us to schedule a demonstration and discuss how to prepare your organization for the next generation of digital interactions. Also be sure to read our press release.

About the Author

Nirav ShahSVP, Product and Solution Marketing | F5

Nirav Shah is the Senior Vice President and Head of Products and Solution Marketing at F5, where he leads the strategic direction for Application Security and AI Security. Before joining F5, he spent eleven years at Fortinet in several leadership positions, most notably heading the AI-Powered SASE, SOC, and Secure Networking solutions. His extensive background also includes significant roles at Cisco Systems, where he spearheaded major initiatives for SD-WAN. With more than two decades of experience in the cybersecurity sector, he has an established record of launching market-defining products and building high-performance teams that align product development with sales and marketing for maximum impact. As a thought leader and USC alumnus, he is a frequent speaker at industry conferences and a regular contributor to leading publications on the intersection of AI and cybersecurity, while remaining dedicated to mentoring emerging cybersecurity professionals.

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