Microsoft on Monday unveiled Project Perception, an AI cybersecurity system built to defend against AI-driven attacks, aiming to keep pace with both hackers and its technology rivals.
The system, which enters public preview Aug. 3, coordinates three sets of AI agents: red team agents that hunt for paths an attacker could take, blue team agents that determine which risks matter and green team agents that make fixes.
It’s based on MAI-Cyber-1-Flash, a new AI model designed specifically for cybersecurity, which the company says does most of the work of larger models at half the cost. It runs in conjunction with OpenAI’s GPT-5.4, which Microsoft reserves for the 10% of tasks it calls exceptionally hard.
Microsoft says the combination scores 96% on CyberGym, a benchmark measuring how well AI systems find real vulnerabilities in large codebases.
The company did not give the model to independent testers before releasing it, according to The New York Times. Microsoft says the model was independently assessed by a third party.
The model is available at launch only to customers of MDASH, Microsoft’s AI-powered tool for finding vulnerabilities in code.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said in a post on X that the initiative is an example of how the company can get better results per dollar by not locking its security systems to a single AI model family.
“This is the benefit of building the harness, context/signals, and action space separate from one model family,” he wrote. “By combining specialized models and data with the right agents, tools, security context, and harness, we can advance the frontier of cost to outcome.”
The initiative was announced Monday morning at an event in San Francisco by Hayete Gallot, the EVP for Microsoft Security, joined by colleagues including Mustafa Suleyman, CEO of Microsoft AI.
In a blog post, Gallot wrote that security needs a new “Cyber Stack,” and that approaches built for a world of human actors cannot keep pace with AI, agents and machine-speed attacks.
In an interview last week for GeekWire’s Microsoft 2.5 series, Gallot said that MDASH was effectively Microsoft’s first step into agentic security.
No system can reason directly over 100 trillion signals a day, so Microsoft is distilling them into a graph that agents can navigate, Gallot said, routing each threat to whichever model handles it best. In practice, this means software can quarantine a device or cut off access on its own.
The announcement comes days after OpenAI disclosed that two of its AI models broke out of a testing sandbox and hacked into Hugging Face, the AI development platform.
Rivals have been more cautious, under government restrictions. Two of the four systems Microsoft benchmarked against, Anthropic’s Mythos 5 and OpenAI’s GPT-5.6 Sol, are limited to small groups of government-approved customers.
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