LAS VEGAS — Anthropic Mythos put a highlight on how agentic AI is altering the sport for cybersecurity, inflicting enterprises to rethink how their safety groups are structured and the way they will stop AI-based threats.
“AI modifications the pace of protection. The unhealthy corollary to that’s it is empowering our adversaries at a tempo that we have by no means seen in our profession,” mentioned Chuck Robbins, CEO of Cisco, in a keynote Tuesday at Cisco Stay.
Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins presents a keynote at Cisco Stay 2026 in Las Vegas Tuesday. KELSEY ZISER/INFORMATIONWEEK
Whereas AI-based threats are on the rise, there’s additionally a possibility to use AI to thwart cybersecurity threats. However to take action, enterprises can even want to beat the “AI belief deficit,” based on Jeetu Patel, president and chief product officer at Cisco. “One of many greatest challenges individuals have with [AI] brokers proper now could be they do not belief it, and should you do not belief it, you are not going to delegate work to them to make use of them,” mentioned Jeetu throughout his keynote Tuesday.
Fixing the “AI belief deficit” would require observability throughout the complete AI stack, which incorporates reaching visibility and insights into utility runtime and mannequin efficiency, Patel defined. That requirement is simpler acknowledged than completed.
“AI brokers are sort of like youngsters. They’re supremely clever, however they don’t have any worry of consequence, and typically they do silly stuff. So, that you must just remember to can defend the world from them,” Patel mentioned.
Cisco is working with different networking and know-how firms to look at how enterprise prospects can enhance their cybersecurity methods within the AI period. As a part of Anthropic’s Challenge Glasswing, Cisco was among the many first 50 open supply, networking and cybersecurity firms tasked with testing the Anthropic Mythos AI mannequin, which may each establish and exploit zero-day vulnerabilities in open supply codebases.
By collaborating in Challenge Glasswing, “Our objective was to know how we may safeguard our prospects, how we may come collectively as a broader ecosystem to work on AI-powered protection and to cease AI-powered threats,” Robbins mentioned. He added that AI-based threats have the potential to have far-reaching implications for companies, governments and society total.
Anthropic mentioned in an announcement on Tuesday that it’s extending its Challenge Glasswing partnership to roughly 150 new organizations.
Three-pronged strategy to agentic safety
Patel mentioned how Cisco is working with enterprises in securing their agentic workforce through three principal targets: by defending AI brokers from exterior threats, stopping AI brokers from creating cybersecurity threats, and detecting and responding to threats “at machine pace.”
Cisco’s AI menace technique contains the launch of Cisco Cloud Management this week, obtainable on a restricted foundation within the U.S. It is presently being utilized by about 60 organizations, together with semiconductor firm AMD.
Cisco Cloud Management expands on final yr’s launch of Safety Cloud Management. The brand new product is a cloud-based community infrastructure administration platform that embeds safety providers with quite a few different IT and networking infrastructure purposes — each Cisco purposes and 50 third-party distributors’ purposes — on a single platform.
Enterprise prospects do not need to be system integrators anymore however wish to distributors to supply all these built-in platforms, Robbins mentioned throughout a press and analyst convention after the keynotes.
Patel mentioned he believes that — with AI — the flexibility to investigate each safety sign/alert is inside attain, predicting the emergence of agentic SOCs that may rapidly establish and stop community anomalies. However for SecOps groups to function at “machine pace and scale,” they might want to spend money on community visibility, menace validation and safety guardrails for AI brokers, he mentioned.
