Fastly gives enterprises real-time control over AI models and agents

Fastly has announced AI Runtime Control, AI Firewall, and new API Security capabilities designed to give organizations real-time visibility and control across their AI systems.

Expanding the Fastly for AI portfolio, these new capabilities help organizations govern AI model access and usage, protect the AI applications powering their business, and control how AI agents access enterprise APIs, all on the same Fastly platform already delivering the speed, security, and resiliency businesses depend on at global scale.

As enterprise AI shifts from experimentation to business-critical production, the focus turns to leveraging AI safely at scale. Organizations now need real-time control over model routing, spend, agent authorization, response optimization, and service reliability as traffic expands.

Fastly is seeing that shift directly. Across Fastly’s network, machine-generated traffic crossed 50% in July and August this year, while AI traffic grew 6.5 times faster than human traffic from January through May this year. Also, financial pressure is rising alongside this growth, with McKinsey finding that 93% of organizations are exceeding their AI budgets.

Fastly extends its programmable, global edge platform to AI, giving organizations greater power and control to run at AI scale. Through the Fastly platform, consistent access, security, and routing policies can now be applied in the request path across vendors or model providers, so organizations can observe, route, secure, and govern AI activity as it happens, without giving up their choice of models or infrastructure.

“To effectively adopt coding agents and implement AI features without losing velocity or eroding existing business resilience, enterprises need control in production, at runtime, without delay, friction, or disruption,” said Kelly Shortridge, Chief Product Officer at Fastly. “Fastly is extending the real-time control customers already trust for content delivery and software security to the models, applications, and agents shaping this new era of distributed systems. Organizations deserve the freedom to move fast with AI while staying safe, achieving innovation at scale without trading off resilience.”

AI creates three critical paths that organizations can govern, protect, and control: applications calling models, users and systems interacting with AI applications, and agents calling enterprise APIs. At the same time, coding agents and AI-assisted development are creating new endpoints faster than they can be documented or reviewed. Today’s launch extends Fastly’s capabilities to address each of these:

• AI Runtime Control (governing AI access and usage): Routes model calls through a single endpoint across public and self-hosted providers, while virtual keys help protect underlying provider credentials. With real-time visibility into token spend, rate limiting, budget controls, and failover, organizations maintain model choice while enforcing policy centrally.
• AI Firewall (protecting AI applications): Mitigates LLM-based attacks, including prompt injection, delivering real-time protection at the edge. By evaluating prompts directly in the request path, organizations can identify and block malicious activity before it reaches targeted models.
• API Security (controlling agents accessing enterprise APIs): Enforces API contracts, applying consistent rules to agentic, agent-assisted, and conventional traffic. Organizations can observe or block non-conforming requests service by service, helping prevent agents from accessing unsupported operations, sending malformed requests, or acting outside established API boundaries.

Fastly for AI combines proven platform capabilities like Bot Management, ContentGuard, DDoS Protection, API Discovery, and Next-Gen WAF with new innovations. Today’s launch extends the platform to control the impact of external AI traffic, govern internal AI activity, and protect autonomous AI agents acting on the organization’s behalf.

Together, these capabilities help organizations build, secure, and deliver their applications, AI, and data on one platform, placing AI control on the same infrastructure already responsible for delivering and protecting their digital experiences.