F5 launches AI-powered WAF upgrades and faster virtual patching to help counter exploits that AI can create within hours.
Frontier AI has collapsed the time between vulnerability discovery and active exploitation,” said Kunal Anand, Chief Product Officer at F5.
Cybersecurity firm F5 has rolled out new tools designed to help companies respond to a growing threat: attacks powered by frontier AI that can turn a software flaw into a working exploit within hours. The company’s answer is a mix of smarter detection and much faster patching, built directly into the traffic path where attacks first appear.
The problem: Patching can’t keep up
Traditionally, fixing a security flaw meant rewriting code, testing it, and pushing out a new release, a process that can take weeks. F5 argues that timeline no longer works when attackers, aided by AI, can weaponise a vulnerability almost as soon as it’s discovered.
“Frontier AI has collapsed the time between vulnerability discovery and active exploitation,” said Kunal Anand, Chief Product Officer at F5. He added that the company’s goal is to buy security teams something in short supply: time to assess risk properly instead of scrambling under pressure.
What’s new
F5’s AI-powered web application firewall (WAF) now includes anomaly detection that learns each application’s normal traffic patterns and flags unusual activity that could signal an attack, rather than relying only on known threat signatures. That approach aims to catch zero-day attacks and exploits that constantly change shape to dodge detection.
A second addition, agentic threat intelligence, builds on F5’s acquisition of Fletch. It combines outside intelligence on active threats with what F5 observes on a customer network, giving security teams a clearer picture of which alerts matter and suggested fixes they can apply immediately.
Frontier AI has collapsed the time between vulnerability discovery and active exploitation.
– Kunal Anand, Chief Product Officer at F5.
Patching in minutes, not weeks
Perhaps the most practical upgrade is “virtual patching,” which lets teams block a known exploit path at the network level within minutes, buying time until developers can ship a permanent fix. F5 says internal testing showed the WAF caught 98% of threats while keeping false alarms to just 1%, a figure that matters because false positives often drive companies to leave firewalls in passive, non-blocking mode.
Why it matters
As AI shortens the gap between vulnerability discovery and exploitation, F5 is betting that speed and precision, not just stronger defences, will define the next phase of enterprise cybersecurity. The takeaway is clear: teams need faster detection and virtual patching to stay ahead of AI-driven attacks. The new WAF features are available now, with broader rollout continuing over the coming months.
