Over the past few months, it’s become clear that modern AI systems are quite adept at discovering software vulnerabilities and finding ways around cybersecurity defenses.

Unintended real-world breaches executed by models from leading AI companies like OpenAI and Anthropic during training exercises have drawn widespread concern, and while those companies have restricted access to their most capable models, experts have indicated it’s only a matter of time before less constrained AI systems have similar capabilities. Already, businesses are seeing a rise in cyberattacks, at least partly attributed to AI assistance. 

And increasingly, the best defense lies in . . . artificial intelligence. 

“We hear a lot about adversaries and attackers using it, and that’s certainly the case,” says Bartley Richardson, chief AI & autonomous systems officer at the cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike. “What we don’t hear as much about is how are we advantaging defenders with the use of AI.” 

CrowdStrike is one of a number of cybersecurity businesses deploying AI on the defensive side. In September, the company announced a tool called SafeMind that purposely takes advantage of AI’s offensive capabilities, deploying custom models and harnesses designed to probe simulated versions of customer infrastructure. SafeMind also deploys defensive AI systems to detect the attacks, fend them off, and close any security holes that are discovered. Both sides then learn from the experience and try again, says Richardson. 

“We not only make the changes in the environment before we give it back to the offense and say try again, but we also have a whole manifest—a whole log of every single change that we made to the environment,” he says.

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