Cisco executives Jeetu Patel, left, Chuck Robbins, Liz Centoni and Steve Clayton speak at a press and analyst conference at Cisco Live.Kelsey Ziser/InformationWeek

LAS VEGAS — Anthropic Mythos put a spotlight on how agentic AI is changing the game for cybersecurity, causing enterprises to rethink how their security teams are structured and how they can prevent AI-based threats. 

"AI changes the speed of defense. The bad corollary to that is it's empowering our adversaries at a pace that we've never seen in our career," said Chuck Robbins, CEO of Cisco, in a keynote Tuesday at Cisco Live. 

While AI-based threats are on the rise, there's also an opportunity to use AI to thwart cybersecurity threats. But to do so, enterprises will also need to overcome the "AI trust deficit," according to Jeetu Patel, president and chief product officer at Cisco. "One of the biggest challenges people have with [AI] agents right now is they don't trust it, and if you don't trust it, you're not going to delegate work to them to use them," said Jeetu during his keynote Tuesday.

Related:How AI is changing the breadth of cybersecurity roles

Solving the "AI trust deficit" will require observability across the entire AI stack, which includes achieving visibility and insights into application runtime and model performance, Patel explained. That requirement is easier stated than accomplished. 

"AI agents are kind of like teenagers. They're supremely intelligent, but they have no fear of consequence, and sometimes they do stupid stuff. So, you need to make sure that you can protect the world from them," Patel said. 

Cisco is working with other networking and technology companies to examine how enterprise customers can improve their cybersecurity strategies in the AI era. As part of Anthropic's Project Glasswing, Cisco was among the first 50 open source, networking and cybersecurity companies tasked with testing the Anthropic Mythos AI model, which can both identify and exploit zero-day vulnerabilities in open source codebases. 

By participating in Project Glasswing, "Our goal was to understand how we could safeguard our customers, how we could come together as a broader ecosystem to work on AI-powered defense and to stop AI-powered threats," Robbins said. He added that AI-based threats have the potential to have far-reaching implications for businesses, governments and society overall. 

Anthropic said in a statement on Tuesday that it is extending its Project Glasswing partnership to approximately 150 new organizations.

Three-pronged approach to agentic security 

Patel discussed how Cisco is working with enterprises in securing their agentic workforce via three main goals: by protecting AI agents from external threats, preventing AI agents from creating cybersecurity threats, and detecting and responding to threats "at machine speed."

Related:Poor UX undermines security policies, says Texas A&M University System CIO

Cisco's AI threat strategy includes the launch of Cisco Cloud Control this week, available on a limited basis in the U.S. It's currently being used by about 60 organizations, including semiconductor company AMD. 

Cisco Cloud Control expands on last year's launch of Security Cloud Control. The new product is a cloud-based network infrastructure management platform that embeds security services with a number of other IT and networking infrastructure applications — both Cisco applications and 50 third-party vendors' applications — on a single platform. 

Enterprise customers don't want to be system integrators anymore but are looking to vendors to provide these types of integrated platforms, Robbins said during a press and analyst conference after the keynotes.  

Patel said he believes that — with AI — the ability to analyze every security signal/alert is within reach, predicting the emergence of agentic SOCs that can quickly identify and prevent network anomalies. But for SecOps teams to operate at "machine speed and scale," they will need to invest in network visibility, threat validation and security guardrails for AI agents, he said.

Related:Anthropic's Mythos forces a rethink of vulnerability management

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