Microsoft said MDASH with MAI-Cyber-1-Flash received a score of 96 percent on CyberGYM, a standard benchmark test. The score is 12 points higher than Anthropic’s Mythos and also beats Google Gemini and OpenAI GPT. The new MDASH costs half as much as the previous MDASH offering.
The second tool Microsoft announced on Monday is called Project Perception. It is also a set of specialized AI agents that perform red, blue, and green team functions to find vulnerabilities, investigate them to determine their risk, and take corrective actions, respectively. Microsoft said the platform selects the models to use based on the assigned task. Considerations that go into the decision include the effectiveness of the model and the final cost to the customer. Microsoft said the decisions are determined by “continuous research, benchmarking and evaluation across frontier and specialized models.”
microsoft saying Project Perception is designed to perform 90 percent of tasks at lower costs than similar competing platforms. That means customers can turn to more expensive alternatives for only the remaining 10 percent of tasks.
Microsoft said the new tools respond to a radical change in the way organizations protect their networks against catastrophic attacks.
“As AI accelerates the speed and scale of cyberattacks, defenders are being asked to protect increasingly complex digital environments with approaches designed for a different era,” the company said. “Security teams are often forced to reconstruct signals, context and risk information in large amounts of data, making it difficult to keep pace with emerging threats.”
Given that last week’s OpenAI incident evokes disturbing scenes straight out of the most dystopian sci-fi novels, the tools, which are currently in preview mode, deserve a healthy dose of caution that Microsoft failed to mention. They must be closely examined and evaluated before being used in production. On the other hand, there are clear risks in not adopting such tools. Balancing the risks of using AI agents against the threat of avoiding them is a work in progress with no clear answers for now.
