While leading US artificial intelligence developers such as Anthropic and OpenAI unveil new models with enhanced cybersecurity capabilities, China is also aggressively scaling up its own AI-driven cyber defence market.

Anthropic’s Mythos, launched in April, sparked a rapid global response due to its ability to discover and exploit cybersecurity vulnerabilities with unprecedented speed and efficiency.

“Our assessment is that China’s own Mythos will definitely emerge, though currently the overall capabilities of its cybersecurity models are far from those of Mythos,” said Austin Zhao, senior research manager at IDC China. “But the overall trend is inevitable because the capabilities of China’s models are also rapidly increasing.”

IDC projected that China’s AI cybersecurity industry would be valued at 59.35 billion yuan (US$8.7 billion) by 2030, a more than 37-fold increase from 1.58 billion yuan in 2025.

The growth would be driven by domestic cybersecurity vendors’ adoption of AI in their product offerings, which was already having a “significant impact” on the industry, Zhao said.

“Almost every vendor is already trying to use AI, with some achieving good results in certain applications such as security operations, data security, threat detection and intelligence interpretation,” he said.