Security

RSAC 2025: Cisco Announces New Open-Source AI Security Model

As the cybersecurity community kicked off its biggest event of the year, Cisco said it wanted to make its new tool available for everyone.

Bob Keaveney

Bob is the managing editor of BizTech magazine.

Cisco announced a new open-source AI model built for security as nearly 45,000 cyberdefense professionals, government officials, analysts and others gathered to kick off the RSAC 25 conference in San Francisco on April 28.

The theme: Cybersecurity Together, with speakers emphasizing the importance of working as a community to defeat always-evolving cybercriminals.

“There’s never been a more important time for us to come together,” said Hugh Thompson, RSAC’s executive chairman. “We convene because we need each other. We need to learn from each other and calibrate with each other. Community has never been more important in our field than it is right now, and I’m always blown away by how open this community is to sharing.”

The ability to learn from one another is more important than ever, as hackers take advantage of artificial intelligence models to launch creative attacks at scale, Thompson and other speakers said.

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“Community is what makes us strong in cybersecurity,” he said. “One thing that blows me away is how important cybersecurity continues to be in society — and how much it’s recognized as important. For example, today at 6:30 a.m., the New York Stock Exchange flew the opening bell to San Francisco to RSAC, and it was rung to open the day for trading. That very rarely happens.”

Thompson noted that RSAC, now in its 34^th year, has posted its highest attendance ever. Submissions to its annual Innovation Sandbox, a contest among the most groundbreaking cybersecurity startups, had more than 200 submissions; that’s another record, and a 40% increase over last year. And through May 1, he said, attendees can choose from more than 400 educational sessions, a list that was culled from more than 2,800 proposed sessions — again, the most ever.

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AI Models Built for Security

If togetherness is the theme of RSAC 2025, AI is the pervasive topic or subtopic of nearly every session. The technology is changing fundamentally both how organizations defend themselves and how criminals attack them.

Jeetu Patel, executive vice president and chief product officer of Cisco, told attendees that organizations needed to do more to both secure their AI models and use AI in their own defense.

“First, we have to secure AI itself,” Patel said. “And then we have to use AI in our defenses, because human scale defenses will be insufficient when the attacks are happening at machine scale.”

To that end, Cisco said it is is releasing “the first open-source reasoning model built specifically for enhancing security applications.” Until now, Patel argued, security teams have been relying on general models like those released by OpenAI. That’s insufficient.

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“What the security industry needs is its own AI models,” Patel said. “If you want to solve hard security problems, you need to be sure that the models you use are purpose-built for security. If you were going to have heart surgery, would you turn to your dentist?”

He said Cisco thought “long and hard about this problem” and decided to release its AI security model — built by a team of AI and security experts that Cisco calls Foundation AI — as an open-source platform, rather than retain it as proprietary intellectual property, because “the real enemy is not our competitor, it’s the adversary.”

The base model is available now, and companies can download the code on Hugging Face, an open-source AI community that facilitates the development and sharing of machine learning models, data sets, and code. Patel said that Cisco plans to release the underlying toolset as well, which will be available soon.

“We now have bespoke security models that will be affordable for everyone,” he said. “Better security efficacy will come at a fraction of the cost with state-of-the-art reasoning. And the truth is, this is just the beginning.”

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