Cisco boosts its AI Defense platform with Anthropic’s Claude Mythos
Network World ·
Cisco has added support for Anthropic’s Claude Mythos to its AI Defense package to help enterprise customers more quickly identify AI agent vulnerabilities before potential attackers can exploit them. As AI agents gain more responsibilities and are allowed access to resources such as enterprise databases, applications, credentials and business workflows, that could open a security problem across the enterprise, according to a blog post by Cisco’s Amy Chang, head of AI threat intelligence and security research, and Vikram Varakantam, senior director of product management, AI software and platform. “Bringing Claude Mythos to AI Defense augments the adaptive red teaming engine where the attacker’s reasoning matters most. As the engine works to understand a target system and plan tests, the model’s reasoning produces attack ideas. When those ideas become concrete payloads, the benefit is sharper still: the capabilities of Claude Mythos are offered under safeguards built for authorized testing,” Chang and Varakantam wrote. Cisco’s AI Defense package offers protection to enterprise customers developing AI applications across models and cloud services. AI Defense is made up of four components: AI Access, AI Cloud Visibility, AI Model & Application Validation, and AI Runtime Protection. AI Access offers visibility into who wants or has use of an AI application, and then it controls access to protect and enforce data-loss prevention and mitigate potential threats. AI Cloud Visibility uncovers AI assets comprising custom-built AI applications offering a single-pane-of-glass view of AI inventory, Cisco said. Optimized for cybersecurity, Claude Mythos can help customers more intelligently reason through an attack as well as analyze how an AI agent is configured and what resources it can access. The advanced AI model can help security teams develop attack strategies specific to their environment, spot particular weaknesses, and predict how end points or other systems may respond to a given problem. With Mythos, customers could discover sophisticated, multi-step attack paths that conventional testing might miss and evaluate agents before they are deployed in the enterprise, Cisco stated. Chang and Varakantam shared a quote from Michael Moore, cybersecurity lead at Anthropic: “Enterprises are increasingly building AI agents into their core operations and want to test those agents thoroughly before putting them into production. By bringing Claude Mythos to Cisco AI Defense, Cisco can help security teams red team their agents with advanced reasoning that plans tests and generates attack ideas for each system.” “The [Mythos] model sits inside AI Defense with a fixed job, a registered target, and objectives defined by the human user. While customers do not get an open interface to Claude Mythos, they get to inform the target and objective, and our agentic red teaming framework conducts the engagement within those bounds. We regard this as an early instance of a broader shift, in which the frontier capabilities most relevant to security are made available to defenders under verified, controlled access rather than withheld from everyone,” Chang and Varakantam wrote. “Cisco designed this deployment to operate against only the target a customer has registered and is authorized to test; it runs with a fixed job and human-defined objectives, has no open interface a customer could use to prompt it freely, and its activity is confined to the authorized target rather than the wider internet. Every action it takes is attributable to a named operator and recorded for audit. These product-level controls sit alongside the program-level safeguards and monitoring, so containment does not rest on any single layer,” Chang and Varakantam wrote. Standard and adaptive red teaming is already available in Cisco AI Defense. Adaptive red teaming with Claude Mythos is coming soon for select enterprises. Broader availability is planned for qualified customers on a when-and-if available basis, Chang and Varakantam stated. Splunk enhancements In other AI agent news, Splunk by Cisco said it is adding new Splunk Agent observability capabilities that allow customers running on Amazon Web Services (AWS) to centrally measure agent cost and quality. The idea is to offers customers an enhanced Tokenomics capability that will help with cost governance by tying AI spend to output quality, Cisco stated . It offers a unified way to monitor each agent by its cost and business results. “Tokenomics pairs the cost of every agent with evaluations that grade the quality and impact of the work, giving organizations a single view of AI ROI. The solution leverages usage data from Amazon Bedrock and Amazon CloudWatch, then combines those technical metrics with customer-defined business KPIs like NPS (Net Promoter Score) or cost-per-claim to produce ROI reports executives can act on,” Cisco stated.