How Cisco defends at machine speed with OpenAI

Cisco, which builds networking and security infrastructure, is using OpenAI's frontier AI reasoning combined with its vast network telemetry to defend against adversaries who leverage AI to scale automated attacks at machine speed. OpenAI's enterprise data privacy approach—zero data retention, strict customer data boundaries, and verifiable isolation—allows Cisco to deploy frontier intelligence across mission-critical systems without compromising sensitive telemetry. Cisco's defense distributes security controls across microservices, containers, and Kubernetes clusters, fusing security into the network fabric and restricting communication to reduce attacker paths. Combining network intelligence with OpenAI's models lets Cisco correlate signals at machine scale to reveal meaningful patterns. Jeetu Patel, President and Chief Product Officer at Cisco, notes that AI narrows the gap between vulnerability exploitation and patching, and describes initiatives like Daybreak and GPT-6 Astra as step-function improvements for both Cisco's and its customers' security posture that fit into existing scanning workflows. As agents become more autonomous, Cisco outlines three priorities: protect agents from malicious attacks, detect and intercept unintended behavior, and operate in near real time. Through the Daybreak Defense Network, Cisco and OpenAI are exploring faster exposure triage and enforcing controls in Cisco Cloud Control, shifting the advantage back to defenders.

(Source：OpenAI)