Oct 28 (Reuters) - Palo Alto Networks ( PANW ) is

expanding its artificial intelligence-powered cybersecurity

offerings, as clients seek to secure their business operations

from rising hacking incidents.

The company's AI tools, combined with its planned

acquisition of Israeli peer CyberArk Software, are deepening

its security offerings amid a wave of high-profile cyberattacks

that has hit global companies, including F5 and

UnitedHealth Group ( UNH ).

Chief Executive Nikesh Arora said some recent breaches

underscore how back-end infrastructure compromises can expose

thousands of customers by revealing vulnerabilities in shared

source code.

Palo Alto launched new versions of its cloud security

platform, Cortex Cloud, and AI application security platform

Prisma AIRS on Tuesday.

The company said Prisma AIRS 2.0 integrates technology from

its recently acquired Seattle-based startup Protect AI, creating

a combined platform to secure AI applications from development

to deployment. It also uses AI systems to automatically find

loopholes in other such systems.

The Cortex Cloud 2.0 now incorporates agentic platform

Cortex AgentiX and a cloud command center, its unified view of

cloud assets to showcase risks and threats across cloud services

of multiple providers.

Customers will have the ability to tailor those agents for

specific user roles, Arora said, adding the pricing of the new

agentic AI offerings would be consistent with the company's

existing Cortex XSOAR platform that unifies and automates

incident response across all security tools.

"We're not going to take actions where the customers can't

reverse them, or the customers can't have that a human in the

middle type of activity. So most of our agents will have humans

in the middle," he added.

The agents are trained on 1.2 billion real-world security

incident responses. Palo Alto's standalone AgentiX platform is

expected to launch early next year, the company said.

Shares of the company were up around 1%. They have risen

about 21% so far this year.