Cisco Unveils Frontier AI Red Teaming and Agent Observability to Secure the Agentic Enterprise

Cisco Unveils Frontier AI Red Teaming and Agent Observability to Secure the Agentic Enterprise AI Defense, Splunk, and Cisco IQ innovations give security and operations teams one loop to find risk, measure value, and prove trust.

News Summary:

MELBOURNE, Australia, Nov. 9, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- CISCO LIVE APJC -- Cisco (NASDAQ: CSCO) today announced it is adding Claude Mythos to AI Defense for red teaming AI applications and agents, empowering defenders to stress-test AI systems with frontier adversary reasoning. Coupled with new Splunk Agent Observability and Cisco IQ advancements, Cisco is preparing enterprises for a new era of trust that requires securing, observing, and governing agents at machine speed.

"You cannot scale what you cannot secure, govern, or observe," said Cisco President and Chief Product Officer Jeetu Patel. "By uniting frontier-level AI runtime protections with machine-speed agent quality controls, we are building a continuous trust loop: protecting agents from compromise while ensuring every token spent delivers measurable business value."

As AI agents proliferate and connect to complex tools and sensitive data, 81% of ITOps and engineering professionals cite increased cooperation between security and observability teams, according to a global Splunk research report last month. Cisco's Splunk and AI Defense innovations equip security leaders to account for token spend and effective tool use while conducting tailored security testing against highly capable AI agents.

Since Cisco launched AI Defense in January 2025, it has helped hundreds of customers identify critical flaws in AI models, applications, and agents before they reach production. Its adaptive red teaming allows security teams to quickly build customized, multi-step attacks on target systems to uncover specific risks. Claude Mythos will augment this framework with advanced reasoning that plans tests that matter and translates the results into attack ideas for each system.

Features include:

"Enterprises are increasingly building AI agents into their core operations and want to test those agents thoroughly before putting them into production," said Michael Moore, Cybersecurity Lead at Anthropic. "By bringing Claude Mythos to Cisco AI Defense, Cisco can help security teams red team their agents with advanced reasoning that plans tests and generates attack ideas for each system."

Cisco engineered AI Defense to use Claude Mythos with multi-layered safeguards:

Closing the Loop: From Test Findings to Measurable Agent ROI

Frontier AI models can excel at complex security tasks such as crafting AI red teaming strategies. That capability cuts both ways. AI is lowering the barrier to entry for attackers just as many enterprises are working to balance security, governance, and ROI considerations across growing AI portfolios.

For organizations to confidently deploy AI agents at scale, they need unified, real-time visibility into AI agent cost, business performance, and quality. Cisco is bridging the trust gap with new Splunk Agent Observability enhancements:

Adaptive red teaming with Claude Mythos is coming soon for select enterprises. Tokenomics will be available in private preview in December, with general availability in AWS Marketplace early 2027. The evaluation models and the evaluation tuner are generally available starting this month.

Connecting Infrastructure Exposure to Security Action with Cisco IQ and Cisco Data Fabric Powered by the Splunk Platform

While understanding vulnerability exposure is critical, defenders must also accelerate how they remediate risk across complex enterprise estates. Cisco IQ identifies critical exposures, and the powerful ecosystem of Cisco Partners and Professional Services turns insight into action. Partners help deliver remediation at scale and modernize infrastructure, and Cisco Professional Services bring deep expertise to put new Cisco capabilities into practice. Together, Cisco and its partners can help streamline operations and future-proof your IT infrastructure for the AI era.

As AI-accelerated threats compress the window between vulnerability disclosure and exploitation from weeks to hours, point-in-time audits leave organizations exposed. To help security and network operations teams act at machine speed, Cisco is extending real-time intelligence from Cisco IQ—which has close to 17,000 customers across more than 22 million devices—directly into enterprise security environments, open agentic protocols, and automated lifecycle workflows.

Key updates include:

"AI is shrinking the time organizations have to respond to threats, and knowing where you're exposed only matters if you can act on it," said Liz Centoni, Cisco EVP and Chief Customer Experience Officer. "Bringing Cisco IQ vulnerability insights into Cisco Data Fabric powered by the Splunk Platform gives analysts that context in the middle of an investigation, so they can decide what to do next. With our partners and Professional Services teams, we're helping customers move from identifying risk to actually reducing it."

To learn more about securing and observing the agentic enterprise, visit cisco.com/go/ai-defense.