Cisco launches AI defender bots to block rogue cyber-agent swarms
Cisco Systems announced a new suite of software tools on Tuesday designed to help businesses deploy their own defensive "armies" of autonomous AI agents to safeguard IT infrastructure against increasingly sophisticated cyber threats.
The platform, named Cisco Cloud Control, allows corporations and government agencies to build and oversee specialized AI agents that continuously monitor networks, detect anomalies, and autonomously block or remove hackers. Cisco executives noted that the launch is a direct response to a shifting threat landscape where human hackers increasingly deploy automated swarms of AI agents to probe networks for vulnerabilities, News.Az reports, citing Reuters.
"You can no longer do things at human scale," DJ Sampath, Cisco’s senior vice president and general manager of AI software and platform, told Reuters. "It has to be machine scale, from an operational perspective."
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The urgency of the rollout is underscored by the broader AI landscape; safety experts and IT professionals are bracing for Anthropic’s upcoming release of its powerful "Mythos" model, which some fear could be weaponized by bad actors to supercharge the speed and scale of cyberattacks.
To speed up the deployment of these automated digital guards, Cisco is embedding AI-assisted coding features directly into the ecosystem. The tech giant is launching an app-store-style marketplace within the platform where IT managers can acquire third-party developer tools. The first tool integrated into the marketplace is OpenAI's Codex. Sampath confirmed that Cisco plans to take a revenue cut from sales processed through this marketplace, though the exact financial percentages are still being finalized.
Cisco Cloud Control officially launches in North America on Tuesday, with the third-party developer marketplace scheduled to go live globally in the second half of 2026.
By Aysel Mammadzada
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