Microsoft threw its hat into the ring Monday in the increasingly heated competition among AI-powered cybersecurity offerings, unveiling tools that it claims are better and cheaper than its rivals.
The new agentic model MAI-Cyber-1-Flash, runs inside another Microsoft security tool, MDASH, and is part of an AI-powered security platform the company dubbed Project Perception.
Microsoft argues that its existing in-house capabilities give Project Perception an edge.
“Project Perception brings together signals, context, models and specialized agents into a continuously learning system of defense,” the company said in a blog post. “It can reason, prioritize and act at machine speed while keeping humans firmly in control and empowering them with powerful new workflows.”
Its release follows splashy AI cybersecurity suite debuts from OpenAI and Anthropic. Companies have been racing to advertise their AI offerings for their ability to find vulnerabilities, even as the most dire warnings about AI being used on the offensive side have yet to come to fruition.
As proof of its superiority, Microsoft said that MDASH with MAI-Cyber-1-Flash beat Mythos, Gemini and GPT on CyberGym, “the gold standard benchmark for evaluating how systems reason over large codebases to find real vulnerabilities in the code.” It scored 96%, 12 percentage points ahead of the next-best.
Microsoft said MAI-Cyber-1-Flash was built with a focus on safety first, and was independently assessed by a third party it didn’t name. AI cybersecurity systems made big news in the past week after OpenAI said its models broke free of its testing confinement to hack Hugging Face, a major AI code platform.
Price also was a big part of Microsoft’s rollout: It said MAI-Cyber-1-Flash in MDASH can do the job at half the cost of other leading models.
“This is the benefit of building the harness, context/signals, and action space separate from one model family,” Microsoft Chairman and CEO Satya Nadella said on social media after the company unveiled Project Perception in San Francisco Monday. “By combining specialized models and data with the right agents, tools, security context, and harness, we can advance the frontier of cost to outcome.”
Project Perception enters public preview on Aug. 3, Microsoft said.