IBM announced cybersecurity measures to help organizations battle a new generation of cybersecurity threats as attackers weaponize frontier AI models.

The IBM Autonomous Security is composed of IBM AI agents and is designed to help automate vulnerability remediation at a faster pace than humans can sustain. It brings together interoperable, vendor-agnostic digital workers that operate across an organization's full security stack, enabling security programs to act as a system rather than a collection of disconnected tools.

"Frontier models are creating a new category of enterprise threat that is fast moving, systemic, and increasingly autonomous," Mark Hughes, global managing partner of cybersecurity services at IBM Consulting, noted. "Meeting that threat requires a systemic defense. AI-powered offense demands AI-powered defense. That's what IBM is delivering."

IBM’s new cybersecurity assessment

IBM Consulting is also offering a cybersecurity assessment to help enterprises evaluate their readiness for agentic-enabled threats. The assessment will be delivered by IBM alongside its technology partners to help users get the support they need across their environments.

IBM Consulting designed the service in a bid to address the challenge of operating sprawling, complex IT estates that are hard to codify, creating ideal conditions for frontier models to identify weaknesses.

IBM said the assessment provides deep visibility into security gaps, policy weaknesses, AI‑specific exposures, and potential exploit paths. It is also designed to deliver prioritized mitigation guidance, including interim safeguards where no immediate software fix exists.

In addition, the assessment highlights opportunities for enterprises to accelerate their detection and response through improved automation and architectural alignment.

IBM recently teamed with Palo Alto Networks on a new framework designed to tackle AI security risks. This included a two-week assessment by IBM to identify AI models, agents, applications, and related components across targeted environments, and prioritized an actionable roadmap with recommendations aligned to key governance and compliance frameworks.

This development followed IBM’s Cisco integration late last year on multi-environment firewalls. That resulted in Cisco Secure Firewall being integrated into IBM Technology Lifecycle Services (TLS) with support for physical, cloud, and virtual firewalls.

IBM cited its own research claiming that 56% of executives were concerned about increased potential for business disruption from generative AI. Just over half (51%) cited unpredictable risks and new security vulnerabilities as a major worry, as well as the vulnerability of existing AI models, data, and services (47%) to new forms of attack.