Microsoft touts cost-saving AI model for cybersecurity

Microsoft on Monday talked up a new artificial intelligence model for spotting cybersecurity vulnerabilities. The move marks the company’s first major push to rejuvenate its cybersecurity business since it brought back Google executive Hayete Gallot to run the unit.

When paired with OpenAI’s general-purpose GPT-5.4, Microsoft’s MAI-Cyber-1-Flash outperforms Anthropic’s Mythos 5, Google’s 3.5 Flash Cyber and OpenAI’s GPT-5.5 Cyber on the CyberGym benchmark, the company said.

“We have world-leading performance at 50% of the cost,” Mustafa Suleyman, CEO of Microsoft AI, said at an event the company held in San Francisco.

The generative model is the software maker’s first for cybersecurity. It will work in its Project Perception, a collection of AI agents for discovering and fixing weaknesses that becomes available in public preview starting Aug. 3, according to a blog post from Gallot.

She rejoined Microsoft in February to become executive vice president of security, as its top leader in the category, former Amazon cloud executive Charlie Bell, became an individual contributor.

Generative AI models have made it easier for attackers to quickly try to exploit newly documented vulnerabilities. Anthropic and OpenAI have released models that can help cybersecurity practitioners with defense.

So far in 2026, Microsoft shares have come down 19%. “Given that consensus view that open-source (Chinese and other) AI models are poised to take share from the frontier labs, investor sentiment about Microsoft’s high OpenAI exposure has swung back to being perceived as a risk,” Microsoft analysts led by Karl Keirstead wrote in a Sunday note to clients. Keirstead recommends buying the stock.

This year the company has announced its own model that can generate code in the GitHub Copilot tool, and lately it’s been drawing on a first-party model in the Excel spreadsheet program. While Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has a partnership with OpenAI to maintain, but he’s also been allocating computing power to train models in house, with an eye toward spending efficiency.

“By combining specialized models and data with the right agents, tools, security context, and harness, we can advance the frontier of cost to outcome,” Nadella wrote in a Monday X post.  

Microsoft hasn’t disclosed the scale of its cybersecurity business since 2023, when it said annual revenue exceeded $20 billion.

In 2023, Microsoft introduced the Security Copilot assistant for cybersecurity practitioners that incorporated OpenAI’s GPT-4. The service now comes with Microsoft’s two most high-end productivity software bundles. Project Perception can suggest and implement code changes once given permission, and it can connect with non-Microsoft products.

Cybersecurity executives “look at this as maybe a way to lower the bar and be able to bring in more talent to actually staff the SOCs and and get more people to participate because right now it’s very limited in the industry,” Gallot told CNBC. Companies maintain security operating centers (SOCs) full of people who look out for threats to information-technology systems.

Last week, OpenAI said its models exploited a vulnerability and attacked AI startup Hugging Face’s infrastructure during a test. Hugging Face used a model from Chinese lab Z.ai to conduct forensic analysis.

“I think it’s a great illustration of why you need to defend with AI against the bad guys who have AI, right?” Gallot said.

There’s plenty of room for Microsoft to improve the performance of the new model.

“We have a unique data set,” Suleyman said in an interview. “We’ve used way less than 1% of that data.”

WATCH: SandboxAQ CEO weighs in on security incidents involving OpenAI and Hugging Face