New Technology brings New Hopes
New Technology brings New Operational Efficiencies
New Technology brings New Business
New Technology brings New Revenue Streams
New Technology brings New Competitive Frontiers
However, New Technology also brings New Threats—and that New Technology demands NewNXT Protection Layer
AI brings one such threat to LLM models, so protection of LLM is must
A fundamental shift is occurring in the current market. The rapid adoption of AI, LLMs, Generative AI, and autonomous AI Agents across industries has introduced a novel class of security vulnerabilities. These include adversarial attacks, large-scale data scraping, prompt injection, unauthorized queries, and LLM manipulation. Traditional WAF solutions were not designed to detect or mitigate these specific AI-centric risks.
In response, a new innovative protection layer has emerged to safeguard AI applications by monitoring and sanitizing the flow of information. While various cybersecurity vendors have launched standalone offerings or integrated these features into existing WAFs over the last few years, the category remains largely undefined.
NowNewNXT is formally defining this security category as “AI-Apps I/O Protection (AIioP).” This category provides a critical layer of protection at the prompt level and ensuring data safety for both the inputs and outputs of LLM models and AI-based applications, and also helps to reduce LLM cost and enhance performance parameters. As of now, AIioP operates under the broader umbrella of the WAAP market, its specialized focus on AI-specific logic sets it apart.
Notable vendors currently offering capabilities in this space and many of them are currently offer these features as a free add-on, NowNewNXT projected that the AI-Apps I/O Protection (AIioP) market will soon see significant commercial adoption, mirroring the historic trajectory and move even faster than the standalone WAF market.
Here are some key highlight:
- Cloudflare released AI Security for Apps (formerly Firewall for AI), a protection layer for LLM-specific threats – Mar 2024
- Fastly launched its AI Accelerator to improve security performance and helps to reduce costs across LLM apps – Jun 2024
- Akamai released Firewall for AI, a protection solution for AI applications against cyber threats – Apr 2025
- A10 introduced AI Firewall to safeguard LLM models with its proprietary LLM safeguarding techniques – Jun 2025
- Radware introduced LLM Firewall, an agentic AI protection solution to protect the LLM prompt – Nov 2025
- Imperva introduced its AI Application Security, a security solution specifically to protect LLM and GenAI apps – Dec 2025
- F5 announced general availability of F5 AI Guardrails, a protection layer for AI model, app, and agent – Jan 2026
- Fortinet Introduced FortiAIGate, a security solution to protect LLMs from AI-specific cyber threats – Mar 2026
- Google introduced its Wiz AI Application Protection Platform (AI-APP) to secure AI apps from cyber threats – Mar 2026
- Citrix announced NetScaler AI Gateway, a security layer for AI Apps and to control LLM costs and performance – Apr 2026
Its interesting to see the competition in the market. who will win the race? the “First Mover” or the “SMART Follower”
What’s your take on it, do you see this trend into reality. Requesting all the end users of LLM models, solution providers and Industry leaders of AIioP to kindly help us with your view.
#AIioP #ApplicationLayerSecurity #WAF #WAAP #BATM #DDoS #APISecurity
#NowNewNXT #SMARTMatrix
#Cloudflare #Fastly #Akamai #Radware #Thales Group #Imperva #F5 #Fortinet #Google #Wiz #Citrix #NetScaler #CheckPointSoftware #PaloAltoNetworks #A10 Networks #NSFocus #Alibaba #Cequence