AI runtime security: 4 common challenges and how to solve them

Today, AI is everywhere. And recent research shows that many security teams are playing catch up even as their attack surface continues to expand and threats become more sophisticated:

97% of organizations have experienced an AI-related breach and report that they lack proper access controls.
77% of organizations don’t have the foundational data and AI security practices needed to protect models, pipelines, and cloud infrastructure.
63% of organizations report a lack of AI governance policies.

With employees across departments embracing AI, enterprises need to safeguard interactions ensure that AI investments operate securely. The pace is only accelerating, and keeping your organization a step ahead of threats is crucial to unlocking secure innovation.

Click the tabs to learn about some of today’s most-pressing AI runtime security challenges—and how the capabilities of the F5 Application Delivery and Security Platform (ADSP) can help solve them.

Stop new threats with purpose-built protections

When it comes to AI applications, traditional blocking methods can be counterproductive. Many users will seek to find ways around them, which leads them to riskier host websites and wrappers.
Instead, organizations need to inspect user interactions and enforce policies in real time. This helps prevent misuse issues such as sensitive information disclosure and harmful outputs, as well as new attacker techniques including prompt injection and jailbreaks.
F5 AI Guardrails is a purpose-built solution for enabling this continuous visibility and control. AI Guardrails operates independently of model providers, ensuring consistent protection across every deployment, including public and private cloud, hybrid, and on-premises environments.
AI Guardrails can be used in combination with F5 AI Red Team—our automated solution for continuous vulnerability testing—to enable a constantly improving runtime security posture. Issues uncovered by AI Red Team are used to automatically generate new protections in AI Guardrails.

Identify unsanctioned use with real-time inspection

Access to new AI tools is never more than a few clicks away, whether they’re approved or not. The use of unsanctioned AI capabilities—commonly referred to as shadow AI—is forcing security teams to consider new ways to uncover and manage AI consumption.
F5 BIG-IP SSL Orchestrator equips your organization to prevent unapproved AI usage and steer employees toward vetted tools. Using this solution, you can decrypt encrypted traffic, expose high-risk actions like sensitive data disclosure, and execute policy-tailored remediation before issues arise.
To help users better understand AI risks, you can also use BIG-IP SSL Orchestrator to implement user coaching via Service Extensions for real-time, contextual security guidance.

Automatically detect and secure API endpoints

AI usage dramatically increases API connectivity, with new endpoints being added constantly. Nearly 60% of organizations currently suffer from API sprawl.
F5 Distributed Cloud API Security combines the power of data analytics and deep insights from machine learning to help your organization discover, monitor, and mitigate API threats.
Distributed Cloud API Security intelligently detects and maps APIs through a combination of approaches, including code repository analysis, runtime traffic inspection, and external web crawling.

Meet regulatory needs with optimized efficiency

With complex AI workloads spread out across multiple environments, compliance risks increase greatly—especially when sensitive data is involved. Further complicating matters, the risk and compliance landscape is constantly evolving, with significant variation across jurisdictions, industries, and use cases.
Organizations need ways to confidently meet ever-shifting requirements without compromising IT productivity.
F5 streamlines compliance with enterprise-wide policy alignment, pre-set controls, and audit-ready logging for regulations including GDPR, HIPAA, and the EU AI Act.

Protect interactions

Stop new threats with purpose-built protections

When it comes to AI applications, traditional blocking methods can be counterproductive. Many users will seek to find ways around them, which leads them to riskier host websites and wrappers.
Instead, organizations need to inspect user interactions and enforce policies in real time. This helps prevent misuse issues such as sensitive information disclosure and harmful outputs, as well as new attacker techniques including prompt injection and jailbreaks.
F5 AI Guardrails is a purpose-built solution for enabling this continuous visibility and control. AI Guardrails operates independently of model providers, ensuring consistent protection across every deployment, including public and private cloud, hybrid, and on-premises environments.
AI Guardrails can be used in combination with F5 AI Red Team—our automated solution for continuous vulnerability testing—to enable a constantly improving runtime security posture. Issues uncovered by AI Red Team are used to automatically generate new protections in AI Guardrails.

Stop shadow AI

Identify unsanctioned use with real-time inspection

Access to new AI tools is never more than a few clicks away, whether they’re approved or not. The use of unsanctioned AI capabilities—commonly referred to as shadow AI—is forcing security teams to consider new ways to uncover and manage AI consumption.
F5 BIG-IP SSL Orchestrator equips your organization to prevent unapproved AI usage and steer employees toward vetted tools. Using this solution, you can decrypt encrypted traffic, expose high-risk actions like sensitive data disclosure, and execute policy-tailored remediation before issues arise.
To help users better understand AI risks, you can also use BIG-IP SSL Orchestrator to implement user coaching via Service Extensions for real-time, contextual security guidance.

Tame API sprawls

Automatically detect and secure API endpoints

AI usage dramatically increases API connectivity, with new endpoints being added constantly. Nearly 60% of organizations currently suffer from API sprawl.
F5 Distributed Cloud API Security combines the power of data analytics and deep insights from machine learning to help your organization discover, monitor, and mitigate API threats.
Distributed Cloud API Security intelligently detects and maps APIs through a combination of approaches, including code repository analysis, runtime traffic inspection, and external web crawling.

Simplify compliance

Meet regulatory needs with optimized efficiency

With complex AI workloads spread out across multiple environments, compliance risks increase greatly—especially when sensitive data is involved. Further complicating matters, the risk and compliance landscape is constantly evolving, with significant variation across jurisdictions, industries, and use cases.
Organizations need ways to confidently meet ever-shifting requirements without compromising IT productivity.
F5 streamlines compliance with enterprise-wide policy alignment, pre-set controls, and audit-ready logging for regulations including GDPR, HIPAA, and the EU AI Act.

F5 is ready to help secure your organization’s AI use. With F5 ADSP, you get a comprehensive AI runtime security solution that allows you to innovate with confidence and efficiency.

Download our eBook today to learn more.