Today, Palo Alto Networks is recognized as a Company to Beat in the August 2026 Gartner® AI Vendor Race: Palo Alto Networks Is the Company to Beat for AI Network Security for CSPs, a designation that applies across global telecom markets. In our view, this recognition validates our strategic focus on 5G-Native Security and Prisma AIRS, our AI security platform designed to secure the 5G core-to-edge, including AI workloads running in the cloud, on the edge, and on devices and endpoints.
In their analysis, at the moment, Gartner identified three core drivers behind our market position:
- “Palo Alto Networks’ aggressive acquisition strategy—with Portkey, Koi, Chronosphere, and CyberArk (now Idira)—significantly broadens its capability to secure AI agent identities, AI gateways, and provide autonomous agentic remediation across complex cloud-native telecom infrastructures.”
- “Palo Alto Networks is actively exploiting its large enterprise installed base and forging aggressive global telecom partnerships to embed its ML-powered Next-Generation Firewalls directly into 5G infrastructure, allowing operators to position security as a monetizable service.”
- “Palo Alto Networks uses its Prisma AIRS platform and 5G-Native Security (powered by Precision AI) to establish an AI security control plane that spans the 5G core to the network edge, with Portkey now embedded as the AI Gateway. This control plane allows Palo Alto Networks to monitor, orchestrate and govern autonomous agents at scale.”
As communication service providers (CSPs) rapidly deploy AI across their networks, our objective is to provide the continuous innovation and engineering velocity required to help them deliver safe, trusted, and secure 5G and AI services that power their businesses.
Front-Runner: Deep 5G-Native Correlation and Edge Ecosystem Integration
We feel our front-runner position rests on a key architectural difference. IP-based controls fragment the moment subscribers, devices, and slices move; our identity-aware 5G portfolio delivers pervasive Defense in Depth across the 5G core, cloud, and edge — enforcement correlated to the mobile identity itself, and integrated across the operator’s edge ecosystem.
In our opinion, Four capabilities mentioned by Gartner makes that real:
Identity-aware correlation. Enforcement is bound to the mobile identity, not the IP address. Per the report:
- “Its ML-powered firewalls, managed via Strata Cloud Manager, correlate alerts with specific 5G identifiers to enforce per-slice policies.”
When policy is pinned to specific 5G identifiers ( SUPI, SUCI, PEI, and IMSI) rather than an address, a decision made in the core is still the right decision at the edge, and per-slice enforcement becomes automatic rather than a manual exercise.
Edge and IoT Security. The platform reaches assets that can’t run an agent. Per the report:
- “Integration with partners like Aeris and Celerway allows Palo Alto to close traditional security gaps at the wireless edge by securing highly mobile, non-traditional network assets like mission-critical 5G edge devices and millions of un-agentable IoT sensors.”
Extending identity-aware policy to mission-critical 5G edge devices and un-agentable IoT sensors closes the gap that endpoint-only approaches leave open at the wireless edge.
5G control plane and sovereign data. A single, centralized plane governs traffic wherever it runs. Per the report:
- “Strata Cloud Manager (SCM) allows Palo Alto Networks’ customers to establish a centralized management interface for routing and inspecting traffic across on-premises, edge, core, and roaming environments. SCM provides real-time visibility by dynamically correlating security alerts with 5G mobile identifiers and enforces Defense in Depth access policies per mobile user, device, or network slice.”
Delivered with operators such as Singtel and U Mobile and infrastructure providers such as Nokia, that same control plane embeds Security-as-a-Service directly in the 4G/5G architecture and protects high-performance AI factories against strict data-sovereignty requirements — proactive, built-in defense rather than endpoint-only protection.
Autonomous SOC and threat research. Governing agents in real time requires machine-speed operations and research that stays ahead of the threat. Per the report:
- “Deployed platforms like Cortex XSIAM and Cortex AgentiX to ingest massive volumes of high-fidelity network telemetry and orchestrate automated security operations. This enables agentic security workflows that can identify infected devices in real time and accelerate AI-driven investigation and remediation across the complex telecom fabric.”
- “Its Unit 42 division — enhanced by differentiating AI acquisitions (Portkey, Koi) and the huntr bug bounty — identifies vulnerabilities in next-generation mobile cores and distributed edge environments. Concurrently, AI red-teaming stress-tests 5G Defense in Depth guardrails to improve critical infrastructure resilience.”
With early access to frontier models from partners including Anthropic and OpenAI, our Unit 42 Frontier AI Defense service and Huntr research community surface novel model- and network-level risks — and those findings flow straight back into the defenses embedded in our ML-powered Next-Generation Firewalls, and into the SECaaS portfolios operators build on top of them.
Taken together, this embedded approach lets operators offer Security-as-a-Service and secure network slices, monetizing across the network lifecycle — piloting AI-driven capabilities in targeted cases and scaling into new use cases such as securing AI coding assistants, enterprise AI apps, and the boom of agentic AI.
Empowering Secure AI Adoption for Telecom
The primary challenge for telecom CIOs and CISOs is maintaining operational control while accelerating AI deployment across disaggregated, cloud-native networks. While standalone point solutions continue to emerge, Prisma AIRS and 5G-Native Security differentiate by offering comprehensive depth across the full AI lifecycle, backed by an established footprint spanning global 4G/5G architectures, edge environments, and IoT deployments.
Together they enable operators to govern and secure every AI interaction, AI apps, agents, and connected assets across the 5G core, edge, and IoT assets, and protect network slices with real-time, automated threat prevention correlated to 5G mobile identifiers.
The Race Continues
We feel being recognized as the current company to beat validates our momentum today, but it is not a finish line. The AI-driven telco is continuously evolving, agentic workloads will keep expanding, and risks will shift. Our commitment remains unchanged: to listen to operators, invest heavily in platform capabilities, and deliver predictable security outcomes at telecom scale.
Operators that succeed with AI will be those that refuse to compromise security for speed.
Palo Alto Networks remains committed to relentless innovation and to serving as your partner of choice to secure the enterprise 5G and AI landscape.
Source & Required Disclosures
Source: Gartner, “AI Vendor Race: Palo Alto Networks Is the Company to Beat for AI Network Security for Telcos ,” 30 July 2026. By: Sylvain Fabre, Peter Liu, Mohini Dukes.
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