Akamai Firewall for AI Enables Secure AI Applications with Advanced Threat Protection – CRN

Akamai Technologies, Inc. announced Firewall for AI, a new solution that provides multilayered protection for AI applications against unauthorised queries, adversarial inputs, and large-scale data-scraping attempts.

As AI rapidly transforms industries, organisations are quickly deploying large language models (LLMs), agentic AI, and other emerging tools. However, these innovations introduce new security vulnerabilities, including adversarial attacks, model extraction, API abuse, and large-scale data scraping — threats that existing web application firewalls (WAFs) are not designed to mitigate. Combined with other new enhancements such as API LLM Discovery, Akamai Firewall for AI provides customers with a holistic set of AI-driven capabilities.

“Traditional security solutions do not stop AI threats,” said Rupesh Chokshi, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Application Security, Akamai. “As enterprises embrace the AI era to unlock new levels of productivity, AI security must be a key enabler. Firewall for AI is a game changer for any enterprise adopting AI. Securing AI applications isn’t just about blocking attacks, it’s about enabling innovation without compromising security or performance. With Firewall for AI, enterprise models, data, and intellectual property are protected from evolving threats.”

Introducing Firewall for AI: Defending AI models from emerging threats
AI models contain valuable proprietary knowledge and sensitive datasets, making them prime targets for attackers. Akamai Firewall for AI addresses this as a purpose-built security solution designed to protect AI-powered applications, LLMs, and AI-driven APIs from emerging cyberthreats. By securing inbound AI queries and outbound AI responses, the firewall closes security gaps that generative AI technologies introduce.

Key features of Firewall for AI include:
Multilayered protection: Blocks adversarial inputs, unauthorised queries, and large-scale data scraping to prevent model manipulation and data exfiltration.
Real-time AI threat detection: Uses adaptive security rules to dynamically respond to evolving AI-based attacks, including prompt injection and model exploitation.
Compliance and data protection: Helps ensure AI-generated outputs remain safe and align with regulatory and industry standards.
Flexible deployment options: Deploys via Akamai edge, REST API, or reverse proxy, enabling seamless integration into existing security frameworks.
Proactive risk mitigation: Filters AI outputs to prevent toxic content, hallucinations, and unauthorised data leaks.

Expanding AI-driven security capabilities
To further protect customer AI deployments and empower secure AI adoption, Akamai is also announcing API LLM Discovery, an enhancement to the Akamai API Security platform, that automatically discovers GenAI and LLM API endpoints, categorises them, and continuously updates security policies to prevent unauthorised access and abuse.