Cisco Unveils AI Defense: A Comprehensive Solution for Enterprise AI Security

Cisco wants to utilize AIto keep your new applications and data safe

AI Defense is "self-optimizing" and will improve over time, Cisco says Cisco has unveiled a new solution aimed at helping businesses build, deploy, and secure, Artificial Intelligence-powered (AI) applications. The company says Cisco AI Defense addresses two key risks - developing, and deploying, secure AI applications. According to Cisco, enterprises are set to develop "hundreds, if not thousands" of AI applications. They cannot afford separate sets of AI security and safety guardrails for each app - they need a unified approach. Cisco says AI Defense's capabilities include discovering AI (giving security teams insight into who is building applications, and which training sources they use), model validation (minimizing the risk of model tuning turning toxic through automated testing), runtime security (continuous validation which safeguards against potential safety and security threats such as prompt injection), and securing access to AI applications. The company says AI Defense is "self-optimizing", delivering controls for a multi-model world. Furthermore, it integrates with existing data flows, and is built into Security Cloud, Cisco's cross-domain security platform. The new tool will become available to enterprises in March 2025. "Business and technology leaders can't afford to sacrifice safety for speed when embracing AI," said Jeetu Patel, Executive Vice President and Chief Product Officer, Cisco. "In a dynamic landscape where competition is fierce, speed decides the winners. Fused into the fabric of the network, Cisco AI Defense combines the unique ability to detect and protect against threats when developing and accessing AI applications without tradeoffs."

Cisco Introduces AI Defense to Transform Enterprise AI Security

In a move to redefine enterprise AI security, Cisco Systems (NASDAQ: CSCO), the global leader in security and networking, has announced the launch of Cisco AI Defense. This solution is designed to safeguard the AI transformation underway in enterprises. As AI adoption across industries continues, the pace of innovation brings with it a surge of unprecedented security threats. Traditional solutions are struggling to keep up, and Cisco aims to bridge this gap by equipping businesses with the tools they need to innovate with confidence. Jeetu Patel, Cisco's executive vice president and chief product officer, said, "Business and technology leaders can't afford to sacrifice safety for speed when embracing AI. In today's fast-paced environment, speed determines the winners. Cisco AI Defense ensures enterprises can deploy AI applications without compromising security, integrating protection directly into the network fabric." According to Cisco's 2024 AI Readiness Index, only 29% of organisations feel adequately prepared to detect and prevent unauthorised tampering with AI systems. With AI applications spanning multi-cloud environments and involving diverse stakeholders, from developers to end users, the risk of vulnerabilities is increasing. Proprietary data used to train models only heightens these challenges and highlights the urgent need for security measures. Cisco AI Defense takes a two-pronged approach to enterprise AI security. The first focus is on developing and deploying secure AI applications. This includes discovery, which identifies both shadow and authorised AI applications across cloud environments, and model validation, where automated testing detects vulnerabilities using an AI-driven "algorithmic red team". Additionally, runtime security ensures continuous monitoring and protection against threats such as prompt injection, denial of service, and data leaks. The second focus is on securing access to AI applications. This involves providing visibility into all AI-enabled apps used within the enterprise, which implements access control to restrict the usage of unsanctioned AI tools and offers threat protection to safeguard sensitive data. Cisco AI Defense offers consistent and centralised security controls for a multi-model, multi-cloud world. Its self-optimising capabilities are powered by Cisco's proprietary machine learning models and threat intelligence from Cisco Talos. This new offering integrates seamlessly with Cisco Security Cloud, its unified AI-driven platform, and extends enriched alerts to Splunk customers, enhancing visibility across the ecosystem. Moreover, Cisco is actively shaping industry standards in AI security, collaborating with organisations like MITRE, OWASP, and NIST.

New Cisco AI Defense solution safeguards AI applications and data - SiliconANGLE

New Cisco AI Defense solution safeguards AI applications and data Cisco Systems Inc. today announced the launch of Cisco AI Defense, a new solution that safeguards artificial intelligence transformations in enterprises against the misuse of AI tools, data leakage and sophisticated threats. The new service has been designed to address new safety concerns and security threats that are emerging that existing solutions are unable or are unprepared to protect against. Cisco AI Defense was purpose-built for enterprises to develop, deploy and secure AI applications with confidence. Cisco argues that the security challenges presented by AI are not only new and complex, but are also ones that most enterprises are unprepared for. With a move to training models in-house, the risk level, particularly when it involves proprietary data, only continues to grow, hence the need for a common layer of safety and security that protects every user and every application. AI Defense addresses two urgent risks in enterprise AI adoption - developing secure AI applications and securing access to them. By providing a unified layer of safety, the service equips organizations to deploy AI confidently while mitigating threats that traditional security tools cannot address. To develop and deploy secure AI, AI Defense offers tools including application discovery, automated model validation and runtime security. Combined, the functionality protects AI systems from vulnerabilities, safeguards model behavior and prevents threats such as prompt injection and data leakage across platforms. For securing access to AI applications, AI Defense ensures visibility into sanctioned and shadow AI tools, enforces access controls and protects sensitive data. The measures allow organizations to prevent data leaks, maintain compliance and ensure safe use of AI tools in a rapidly evolving threat landscape. Differing from model-specific safety guardrails, Cisco AI Defense also provides consistent, cross-platform controls for a multi-model environment. Powered by machine learning and threat intelligence from Cisco Talos, the service is able to adapt to evolving AI security concerns and enhances protection with enriched alerts for Splunk users. "Business and technology leaders can't afford to sacrifice safety for speed when embracing AI," Jeetu Patel, executive vice president and chief product officer of Cisco, said in a statement. "Fused into the fabric of the network, Cisco AI Defense combines the unique ability to detect and protect against threats when developing and accessing AI applications without tradeoffs." Cisco AI Defense will be available to existing and new Cisco users starting in March.

Cisco Unveils AI Defense to Secure the AI Transformation of Enterprises

Purpose-built for enterprises to develop, deploy and secure AI applications with confidence. Cisco (NASDAQ: CSCO), the leader in security and networking, today announced Cisco AI Defense, a pioneering solution to enable and safeguard AI transformation within enterprises. As AI technology advances, new safety concerns and security threats are emerging at an unprecedented speed which existing security solutions are unprepared to protect against. Cisco AI Defense is purpose-built for enterprises to develop, deploy and secure AI applications with confidence. "Business and technology leaders can't afford to sacrifice safety for speed when embracing AI," said Jeetu Patel, Executive Vice President and Chief Product Officer, Cisco. "In a dynamic landscape where competition is fierce, speed decides the winners. Fused into the fabric of the network, Cisco AI Defense combines the unique ability to detect and protect against threats when developing and accessing AI applications without tradeoffs." The stakes of something going wrong with AI are incredibly high. According to Cisco's 2024 AI Readiness Index, only 29% of those surveyed feel fully equipped to detect and prevent unauthorized tampering with AI. The security challenges are also new and complex, with AI applications being multi-model and multi-cloud. Vulnerabilities can occur at model or app level, while responsibility lies with different owners including developers, end users and vendors. As enterprises move beyond public data and begin training models on proprietary data, the risks only grow. To unlock AI innovation and adoption, enterprises need a common layer of safety and security that protects every user and every application. AI Defense enables enterprises' AI transformations by addressing two urgent risks: Developing and Deploying Secure AI Applications: As AI becomes ubiquitous, enterprises will use and develop hundreds if not thousands of AI applications. Developers need one set of AI security and safety guardrails that work for every application. AI Defense helps developers move fast and unlock greater value by protecting AI systems from attacks and safeguarding model behavior, across platforms. The capabilities of AI Defense include: Discovering AI: Security teams need to understand who is building applications and the training sources they use. AI Defense detects shadow and sanctioned AI applications across public and private clouds. Model Validation: Model tuning can lead to toxic and unexpected outcomes. Automated testing checks AI models for hundreds of potential safety and security issues. This AI-driven algorithmic red team identifies potential vulnerabilities and recommends guardrails in AI Defense for security teams to use. Runtime Security: Continuous validation safeguards against potential safety and security threats such as prompt injection, denial of service and sensitive data leakage on an ongoing basis. Securing Access to AI Applications: As end users rush to adopt AI applications like summarization tools to improve their productivity, security teams need to prevent data leakage and the poisoning of proprietary data. AI Defense enables security teams with: Visibility: Provides a comprehensive view of shadow and sanctioned AI-enabled apps used by employees. Access Control: Implements policies that restrict employee access to unsanctioned AI tools. Data and Threat Protection: Continuously safeguards against threats and confidential data loss while ensuring compliance. Unlike safety guardrails built into individual AI models, Cisco delivers consistent controls for a multi-model world. AI Defense is self-optimizing, leveraging Cisco's proprietary machine learning models to detect ever-evolving AI safety and security concerns based on threat intelligence data from Cisco Talos. Splunk customers that are using AI Defense will receive enriched alerts with additional context from across the entire ecosystem. AI Defense integrates seamlessly with existing data flows for unparalleled visibility and control and is built into the Security Cloud, Cisco's unified, AI-driven, cross-domain security platform. It leverages Cisco's extensive mesh of enforcement points to perform AI security at the network level in a way only Cisco is optimized to deliver. Accuracy and trustworthiness are essential for protecting enterprise AI applications, and Cisco has been actively involved in developing AI security industry standards, including those from MITRE, OWASP, and NIST. "The adoption of AI exposes companies to new risks that traditional cybersecurity solutions don't address," said Kent Noyes, Global Head of AI & Cyber Innovation at World Wide Technology. "Cisco AI Defense represents a significant leap forward in AI security, providing full visibility of an enterprise's AI assets and protection against evolving threats." AI Defense is the latest in a series of AI-driven security innovations from Cisco, including Cisco Hypershield. Cisco AI Defense will be available in March for enterprises to safeguard their AI transformations. For more information, visit cisco.com/go/ai-defense. Additional Resources: Blog: Protecting AI So AI Can Improve the World, Safely Blog: Cisco AI Defense: Comprehensive Security for Enterprise AI Adoption Animation: Cisco AI Defense About Cisco Cisco (NASDAQ: CSCO) is the worldwide technology leader that is revolutionizing the way organizations connect and protect in the AI era. For more than 40 years, Cisco has securely connected the world. With its industry leading AI-powered solutions and services, Cisco enables its customers, partners and communities to unlock innovation, enhance productivity and strengthen digital resilience. With purpose at its core, Cisco remains committed to creating a more connected and inclusive future for all. Discover more on The Newsroom and follow us on X at @Cisco. Cisco and the Cisco logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of Cisco and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and other countries. A listing of Cisco's trademarks can be found at http://www.cisco.com/go/trademarks. Third-party trademarks mentioned are the property of their respective owners. The use of the word 'partner' does not imply a partnership relationship between Cisco and any other company

Cisco Amplifies AI Security With AI Defense

'The companies that are making great use of AI currently, they're being held back by the safety and security of AI as one of the key impediments to accelerated adoption,' Cisco EVP and Chief Product Officer Jeetu Patel says of the tech giant's new offering, AI Defense. Cisco Systems knows that one of the biggest barriers holding up AI application development and deployment today is security. That's why the tech giant, with the help of some technology from a recent acquisition, has unveiled AI Defense for partners and end customers. "There's going to be two types of companies in the world. There's going to be companies that know how to make great use of AI, and then there are companies that will be irrelevant. The companies that are making great use of AI currently, they're being held back by the safety and security of AI as one of the key impediments to accelerated adoption," Jeetu Patel, Cisco's executive vice president and chief product officer, told CRN. AI Defense, introduced during Cisco's AI Summit in San Jose, Calif., Wednesday, safeguards enterprises against the misuse of AI tools, data leakage and increasing cyberthreats, all of which existing point security offerings are not equipped to handle during the development, deployment and ongoing use of AI apps, Patel said. [Related: Cisco To Buy Threat Detection Startup SnapAttack To Help Win Over More Security Customers] Similar to SaaS security solutions that protect the entire cloud environment, AI Defense will give enterprises a common layer of safety and security that protects every user and every application, something that is lacking into today's AI landscape, Patel said. "That's the problem that we wanted to solve with AI Defense: to make sure that anyone who wants to build an application with AI, that we can provide them with the right level of safety and security, visibility, validation and guardrails so that they don't have to worry about that. They can focus on building the most innovative use cases that can transform their businesses," he said. The offering was designed using the "core secret sauce" that Cisco acquired in August from Robust Intelligence, a privately held AI security solutions company, Patel said. AI Defense will be tightly integrated into Cisco's Secure Access security service edge (SSE) Offering, Hypershield, and will be integrated with Cisco Multicloud Defense. Users and partners will be able to access AI Defense from one platform, Cisco Security Cloud, rather than add another point security solution to enterprises' plates, he said. "We will be able to use each of those enforcement points for AI Defense," Patel added. It's part of what makes AI Defense unique. It's not just another AI feature, and it also absolves the end customer and partner from having to add yet another security tool into their environment that's not integrated with anything else, he said. "What we're doing with AI Defense is not being done by any company right now," Patel said. Cisco's 2024 AI Readiness Index found that only 29 percent of survey respondents feel fully equipped to detect and prevent unauthorized tampering with AI. It's a big gap that's holding the industry back from fully experiencing the benefits of AI, Patel said. It's also a big area of opportunity for solution providers, especially those that are creating more practices around AI and AI resilience, he said. AI Defense will help on two fronts: developing and deploying secure AI apps and securing ongoing access to AI apps. The offering will ensure the security and safety guardrails during the development and deployment of AI apps, discovery of all AI apps, including those sanctioned by the company and "shadow" AI apps, model validation and red teaming, and continuous security validation against potential threats or data leakage, the company said. AI Defense will pull and learn from security data from Cisco Talos threat intelligence, Splunk, and the Robust Intelligence team that is doing threat research for Cisco post-acquisition. "All of those pieces getting fed into our model for AI defense, that's another huge advantage of the platform. We've got so much data that's being fed into the platform ... security, eventually, is a data game," Patel said. Cisco AI Defense will be generally available in March, according to the company.

Cisco Introduces AI Defense to Guard Enterprises Against Evolving AI Threats

Data and Threat Protection: Continuously safeguards against threats and confidential data loss while ensuring compliance. Unlike safety guardrails built into individual AI models, Cisco delivers consistent controls for a multi-model world. AI Defense is self-optimizing, leveraging Cisco's proprietary machine learning models to detect ever-evolving AI safety and security concerns based on threat intelligence data from Cisco Talos. Splunk customers that are using AI Defense will receive enriched alerts with additional context from across the entire ecosystem. AI Defense integrates seamlessly with existing data flows for unparalleled visibility and control and is built into the Security Cloud, Cisco's unified, AI-driven, cross-domain security platform. It leverages Cisco's extensive mesh of enforcement points to perform AI security at the network level in a way only Cisco is optimized to deliver. Accuracy and trustworthiness are essential for protecting enterprise AI applications, and Cisco has been actively involved in developing AI security industry standards, including those from MITRE, OWASP, and NIST.

Cisco AI Defense: Comprehensive Security for Enterprise AI Adoption

Today, we are witnessing artificial intelligence radically reshape the way we do business. Last year, we published our Cisco AI Readiness Index, which provided critical insights into the state of enterprise AI adoption. In both our survey results and my own conversations with business leaders, a common trend was evident. Despite growing pressures to harness this transformational technology, AI readiness seems to be declining. There are several factors behind this but concerns around safety and security are among the most prominent. AI's rapid evolution has introduced risks that traditional cybersecurity solutions aren't built to address. These risks can include unintended behaviors, data privacy breaches, algorithmic bias, and potential misuse of AI systems, potentially leading to reputational, financial, and legal consequences for businesses. I'm proud to announce Cisco AI Defense, the first truly comprehensive solution for enterprise AI security. Building on Cisco's decades of leadership in networking and security, AI Defense delivers unmatched visibility and protection for developing, deploying, and using AI across the business. At a high level, the risk of enterprise AI is two-fold. There are practical concerns about sensitive data exposure from employees sharing intellectual property, PII, and other confidential information with unsanctioned third-party AI tools. At the same time, businesses developing and deploying their own AI applications need to address a variety of vulnerabilities to ensure these systems are safe and secure for customers. Cisco AI Defense is a single, end-to-end solution that helps your organization understand and mitigate risk on both the user and application levels. To accomplish this, it comprises four main components: AI Access, AI Cloud Visibility, AI Model & Application Validation, and AI Runtime Protection. Let's look a little closer at exactly how AI Defense accomplishes this. In addition to the wealth of new AI tools that have appeared over the last few years, virtually every existing application provider has tried to add AI capabilities to their products. It won't be long before every application is an AI application. To employees, these tools promise greater productivity levels in only a fraction of the time. However, to security teams, they introduce an entirely new and difficult-to-manage massive risk surface. Cisco AI Defense gives security teams comprehensive visibility and control over the rapidly growing threat of shadow AI. AI-enabled applications are automatically discovered and assessed to provide important context around usage and risk severity. With these insights, security teams can enforce granular policies that prevent sharing sensitive data and limit access to unsanctioned AI applications across the organization. We are moving from a world that is multi-cloud to one that is multi-cloud and multi-model. As the attack surface grows, so does the potential impact of any attack. Enterprise AI readiness requires an entirely new set of safety and security measures because risk exists at every point in the AI lifecycle. Let's picture two scenarios. In the first, an AI developer fine-tunes a reputable open-source model to create an AI education assistant. This inadvertently weakens built-in guardrails, and the application begins sharing harmful content with students. In another case, an AI developer trains their application on public data, some of which contains discreet instructions that distribute a phishing link to thousands of end users. The business providing the AI application is ultimately responsible for the impact of the breach. Cisco AI Defense is designed specifically for the safety and security challenges of this new multi-cloud, multi-model world. It enables teams to identify, assess, and protect AI assets across distributed cloud environments with algorithmic vulnerability testing and hundreds of runtime protection categories. Until today, security concerns have blocked the wide-scale development and deployment of enterprise AI applications -- and understandably so. Cisco AI Defense addresses AI risk from beginning to end, giving business and security leaders the confidence to bring AI applications to market. Businesses have only just scratched the surface of enterprise applications for AI. With Cisco AI Defense, we created a solution designed for the new safety and security challenges of a multi-cloud, multi-model world. Our underlying objective? Remove this massive barrier to adoption and unblock the enterprise AI transformation. AI Defense builds on the cutting-edge work of Robust Intelligence, an AI security company recently acquired by Cisco. They pioneered several breakthroughs, from supply chain security, algorithmic jailbreaking, and introduced the industry's first AI Firewall. Combined with world-class detection models powered by Scale AI and integrated telemetry from Cisco Talos, AI Defense offers unmatched protection and delivers unparalleled AI security capabilities. The solution embeds purpose-built AI security technology into the existing network visibility and enforcement points in the Cisco Security Cloud. By performing AI security at the network level, we empower security teams to provide consistent and reliable protections for enterprise AI applications across any number of clouds and models. This saves developers valuable time and resources which can be spent pushing AI innovation even further. Our approach takes advantage of Cisco's proven networking leadership and leverages our extensive mesh for unparalleled control over AI traffic. It's also a testament to our continued investment and commitment to AI and AI security. We could not be more excited about this announcement, and we'll have more to share in March 2025. For now, you can learn more by visiting the Cisco AI Defense product website.

Unpacking Cisco AI Defense: its implications for customers and the company - SiliconANGLE

Unpacking Cisco AI Defense: its implications for customers and the company Cisco Systems Inc. this week held its first AI Summit, a thought leadership event on the pivotal topics shaping the future of artificial intelligence -- this one focused on the security of AI systems. The summit was small and intimate, with about 150 attendees, including executives from about 40 Fortune 100 companies. I understand why the interest from top companies was so high, as the speaker list was impressive and included AI luminaries such as Alexandr Wang, founder and chief executive of Scale AI Inc.; Jonathan Ross, founder ad CEO of Groq Inc.; Aaron Levie, co-founder and CEO of Box Inc.; Brad Lightcap, chief operating officer of OpenAI; David Solomon, CEO of Goldman Sachs; and many others. From a product perspective, Cisco leveraged AI Summit to announce a new tool called Cisco AI Defense, which, as the name suggests, safeguards AI systems. According to Cisco's 2024 AI Readiness Index, only 29% of organizations feel equipped to stop hackers or unauthorized users from accessing their AI systems. AI Defense aims to change that statistic. The product's release is well-timed, as AI security is now at the top of business and information technology professionals' minds. This week, I also attended the National Retail Federation show in New York. There, I attended three chief information officer events, with a combined attendance of about 50 IT executives. Every IT executive at the three events was highly interested in AI. The primary thing holding most of them back was security, particularly for regulated industries such as healthcare, retail and financial services. Cisco's AI Defense is designed to give security teams a clear overview of all the AI apps employees use and whether they are authorized. For example, the tool offers a comprehensive view of shadow AI and sanctioned AI apps. It implements policies restricting employee access to unauthorized apps while ensuring compliance with privacy and security regulations. One common theme from my IT discussions is that no one wants to be the "department of no," but they also understand that without the proper controls, the use of AI can put businesses at risk. Also, it has been shown over time that when IT departments say no, users find a way around it. It's better to provide options for users, and Cisco AI Defense offers the visibility and controls required for workers to be safe. The tool is also helpful for developers because applications can be secured at every stage of the application lifecycle. During development, it pinpoints weaknesses in AI models so potential issues can be fixed early. This helps developers create secure apps immediately without worrying about hidden risks. When it's time to deploy those apps, AI Defense ensures they run safely in the real world. It continuously monitors unauthorized access, data leaks and cyberthreats. The tool provides ongoing security even after deploying an app by identifying new risks. One of the tool's unique attributes is its continuous validation at scale. One of the challenges of security AI is that while a company could use traditional tools to secure the environment at any point, guardrails will have to be adapted if the model changes. Cisco AI Defense uses threat intelligence from Cisco Talos and machine learning to continually validate the environment and automate the tool's updates. This also builds on Cisco's security portfolio, which is taking shape nicely as a platform. In the analyst Q&A, I asked Cisco Chief Product Officer Jeetu Patel (pictured, left, with Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins), about the "1+1=3" effect if you use AI Defense with Hypershield. He corrected me and said four technologies created a "1+1+1+1=20." These include Cisco Secure Access, Hypershield, Multi-Cloud Defense, and AI Defense. "These four work in concert with each other, Patel said. "If you want visibility into the public cloud or what applications are running, Multi-Cloud Defense ties in with AI Defense and gives you the data needed to secure the environment. If you want to ensure enforcement on a top-of-rack switch or a server with an EBPF agent, that can happen as AI Defense is embedded into Hypershield." What's more, he added, "we will partner with third parties and are willing to tie this together with competitor products. We understand the true enemy is the adversary, not another security company, and we want to ensure we have the ecosystem effect across the industry." DJ Sampath, Cisco's vice president of product, AI software and platform, added, "AI Defense data would be integrated into Splunk, so all the demonstrated things will find their way into Splunk through the Cisco Add-On to enrich the alerts you see in Splunk." Given the price Cisco paid for Splunk Inc., integrating more Cisco products and data into it will create a multiplier effect on revenue. I firmly believe that share shifts happen when markets transition, and AI security provides a needle-moving opportunity for Cisco and its peers. AI will create a rising tide for the security industry, but the company that nails doing it easily will benefit disproportionately. The vision of what Cisco laid out is impressive, but the proof will come when the product is available. We shouldn't have to wait long, since it's expected to be available this March. For those who missed it, the event will be rebroadcast next Wednesday, Jan. 22.

Protecting AI so AI Can Improve the World, Safely

The world is in the middle of an unprecedented era of artificial intelligence innovation. Looking ahead, there will be two types of companies: those who will lead on AI and those that risk irrelevance. For the organizations who take AI seriously, the composition of their workforce is about to change dramatically. Today, their workforce is entirely human. Tomorrow, it will expand exponentially to include a variety of AI workers -- including apps, agents, robots, and even humanoids. We'll be living in a world where connected AI agents and people work together to orchestrate all manner of complex workflows. And I believe it will translate into massive gains in productivity and capacity, with considerable shared benefits. Imagine what a human population of 8 billion people can accomplish if we collectively have the capacity of 80 billion. The question, though, is how can we make this transition safely and securely? Keeping AI safe and secure in an enterprise is a difficult and relatively new problem. That's because AI applications are built differently, adding a new layer to the stack: models. Unlike traditional applications, AI models can behave unpredictably, and the reality is that most organizations will be using multiple models across public and private clouds. This multi-model, multi-cloud and multi-agent landscape demands a new approach to safety and security. Raising the stakes even more, when models fail, the consequences can be severe. Safety issues -- like bias, toxicity, or inappropriate outputs -- must be addressed, alongside threats from external actors exploiting vulnerabilities to steal confidential data or otherwise compromise your security. Model vendors and app builders will implement their own safeguards, but these measures while necessary will inevitably be fragmented and insufficient. Ultimately, your security teams will need a common layer of visibility and control. They need to not only to see and understand everywhere AI is being used in your organization (by both users and app developers), they also must continuously validate and enforce your preferred guardrails over how AI models, applications and agents are behaving. You need to move fast with AI, but you absolutely cannot afford to sacrifice safety and security for speed. That's why today, at our AI Summit, we announced Cisco AI Defense -- a solution designed to eliminate this tradeoff and empower you to innovate fearlessly. AI Defense provides robust protection in two critical areas: AI Defense is built on two game changing innovations we're pioneering: continuous AI validation and protection at scale. You need to make sure your AI models are fit-for-purpose, and that they don't have vulnerabilities, unexpected behaviors, data poisoning, or other issues. For traditional applications, you'd use a "red team" of humans to try to break the application and find vulnerabilities. Unfortunately, this isn't realistic for non-deterministic AI models. This is where our AI Algorithmic Red Team capability comes in. It's one of the big reasons why Cisco acquired Robust Intelligence last summer. They're a team of AI security pioneers that have developed what we believe is the world's first algorithmic red teaming solution. The AI Algorithmic Red Team sends a successive series of prompt variants to a model to try to get it to provide responses it shouldn't. Rather than having a red team of thousands of people try to jailbreak a model for weeks, we do it in just seconds. It's kind of like playing a game of 100 questions. But because it's automated, it's a game of 1 trillion questions. And AI makes 1 trillion look small. Once AI Defense finds vulnerabilities, it recommends guardrails that you can apply. And it does this continuously. So, any time your model changes or any time there's a new type of threat, your model is re-validated and updated guardrails are applied. Thanks to our platform approach, we can protect AI at scale in ways that only Cisco can deliver. We already fuse traditional security directly into the network. You get thousands of distributed enforcement points, everywhere you need them, close to the users and close to the workloads. These control points can sit in an application in the public cloud, on the infrastructure in a private cloud, on a server, on a top-of-rack switch, or even out at the edge. AI Defense takes full advantage of this platform approach so that your AI guardrails are likewise hyper-distributed and available wherever you need them. You get total visibility across your entire AI footprint, and the control to enforce everywhere. Critically, AI Defense is also frictionless for developers. In fact, it's invisible. There are no agents, it requires no libraries, nothing to slow down development. That means you can move fast to create new AI experiences and innovate for your customers. AI Defense is built on purpose-built technology and our own custom AI models powered by Scale AI. By working closely with leaders like Scale AI, and leveraging our own proprietary intelligence, AI Defense provides unparalleled insight, ensuring fast, efficient, and accurate protection. I'm incredibly proud of what our team has achieved with Cisco AI Defense. This solution empowers organizations to move fast, innovate boldly, and unlock AI's full potential -- securely and without tradeoffs.

AI Defense: A Vision to Securely Harness AI

The stakes of something going wrong with AI are incredibly high. Only 29% of organizations feel fully equipped to detect and prevent unauthorized tampering with AI[1]. With AI, emerging risks target different stages of the AI lifecycle, while responsibility lies with different owners including developers, end users and vendors. As AI becomes ubiquitous, enterprises will use and develop hundreds if not thousands of AI applications. Developers need AI security and safety guardrails that work for every application. In parallel, deployers and end users are rushing to adopt AI to improve productivity, potentially exposing their organization to data leakage or the poisoning of proprietary data. This adds to the growing risks related to organizations moving beyond public data to train models on their proprietary data. So, how can we ensure the security of AI systems? How to protect AI from unauthorized access and misuse? Or prevent data from leaking? Ensuring the security and ethical use of AI systems has become a critical priority. The European Union has taken significant steps in this direction with the introduction of the EU AI Act. This blog explores how the AI Act addresses security for AI systems and models, the importance of AI literacy among employees, and Cisco's approach for safeguarding AI through a holistic AI Defense vision. The EU AI Act represents a landmark effort by the EU to create a structured approach to AI governance. One of its components is its emphasis on cybersecurity requirements for high-risk AI systems. This includes mandating strong security protocols to prevent unauthorized access and misuse, ensuring that AI systems operate safely and predictably. The Act promotes human oversight, recognizing that while AI can drive efficiencies, human judgment remains indispensable in preventing and mitigating risks. It also recognizes the important role of all employees in ensuring security, requiring both providers and deployers to take measures to ensure a sufficient level of AI literacy of their staff. Identifying and clarifying roles and responsibilities in securing AI systems is complex. The AI Act primary focus is on the developers of AI systems and certain general purpose AI model providers, although it rightly acknowledges the shared responsibility between developers and deployers, underscoring the complex nature of the AI value chain. In response to the growing need for AI security, Cisco has envisioned a comprehensive approach to protecting the development, deployment and use of AI applications. This vision builds on 5 key aspects of AI security, from securing access to AI applications, to detecting risks such as data leakage and sophisticated adversarial threats, all the way to training employees. "When embracing AI, organizations should not have to choose between speed and safety. In a dynamic landscape where competition is fierce, effectively securing technology throughout their lifecycle and without tradeoffs is how Cisco reimages security for the age of AI." "The EU AI Act underscores the importance of equipping employees with more than just technical knowledge. It's about implementing a holistic approach to AI literacy that also covers security and ethical considerations. This helps ensure that users are better prepared to safely handle AI and to harness the potential of this revolutionary technology." This vision is embedded in Cisco's new technology solution "AI Defense". In the multifaceted quest to secure AI technologies, regulations like the EU AI Act, alongside training for citizens and employees, and innovations like Cisco's AI Defense all play an important role. As AI continues to transform each and every industry, these efforts are essential to ensuring that AI is used safely, ethically, and responsibly, ultimately safeguarding both organizations and users in the digital age.