Cisco Foundation AI debuts agentic security tools to protect autonomous AI systems – News

Cisco Foundation AI, Cisco System Inc.’s research and engineering group focused on building foundational artificial intelligence technologies, today announced a suite of new agentic security tools.

They’re designed to help enterprises secure AI systems as they become more autonomous, interconnected and embedded across business operations. The new releases are focused on allowing AI systems to reason through complex security problems, retrieve evidence dynamically from fragmented data sources, and execute security workflows while maintaining transparency and human oversight.

Security teams are grappling with the challenge of protecting AI-driven environments that increasingly span cloud platforms, internal systems and external data sources. The Cisco Foundation AI team argues that traditional security approaches struggle to keep up with the speed and complexity of modern AI workflows, particularly as agentic AI systems begin to make decisions and take actions on their own.

Leading the list of announcements is the launch of Foundation-sec-8B-Reasoning, an open-weight reasoning model built specifically for cybersecurity use cases.

The model, unlike general-purpose language models, is optimized for multistep security analysis, including threat modeling, attack path analysis and incident investigation. The model produces explicit reasoning traces that allow analysts to understand how conclusions are reached, supporting validation, trust and regulatory requirements in high-impact security environments.

Cisco also introduced its Adaptive AI Search Framework, a reasoning-driven information retrieval system designed to move beyond static query-based searches. The framework allows AI models to iteratively refine their search strategies as new information emerges, much like a human security expert would. It’s designed to improve threat intelligence analysis and incident response by allowing AI systems to adapt their investigation paths when dealing with incomplete, noisy or fragmented data sources.

The third release today, the PEAK Threat Hunting Assistant, is an open-source agentic AI assistant aimed at automating threat hunting preparation. It uses teams of cooperating AI agents to research threat actors and techniques, analyze internal security data and generate customized, step-by-step threat hunt plans. Cisco Foundation AI notes that PEAK helps keep humans in the loop to allow security teams to retain control over decisions, models and data access.

“Collectively, the reasoning model, AI search framework and PEAK reflect how Cisco Foundation AI is delivering disproportionate impact by addressing foundational challenges at the intersection of AI and security,” Yaron Singer, vice president of AI and security at Cisco Foundation AI, said in a blog post. “Cisco’s approach emphasizes open, security-native foundations, enterprise deployability and architectural rigor.”

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