Microsoft touts cost-saving AI model for cybersecurity

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella speaks at the Microsoft AI Tour at TikTok Entertainment Centre in Sydney on April 23, 2026.George Chan | Getty ImagesMicrosoft 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, b...