Cisco has released two small, open AI models for cybersecurity. Antares-350M and Antares-1B：https://huggingface.co/collections/fdtn-ai/antares spot vulnerabilities in software code. Cisco's pitch is bang for the buck. Developer Aman Priyanshu claims on X：https://x.com/AmanPriyanshu6/status/2079703080640364848 that the smallest model catches about 150 times more vulnerabilities per dollar than large AI agents like Cognition's Devin Security Swarm. In Cisco's own tests, according to Axios：https://www.axios.com/2026/07/21/cisco-open-source-ai-models-cybersecurity, Antares scanned 500 code repos in about 15 minutes for under a dollar. GPT-5.5 took five hours and cost over $100 for the same job.
Both models run locally, so sensitive code never leaves the company. The technical report：http://cisco-foundation-ai.github.io/antares/technical-report.pdf says the models were trained on roughly 72 percent security-concept data and 15 percent code search histories.
Cisco is keeping a larger three-billion-parameter version for its own products. That version reportedly performs close to GPT-5.5 and beats open models up to 200 times its size. The company is also exploring an industry consortium for open AI security tools. Ad DEC_D_Incontent-1 Ad
Stay in the loop on AI. Clear, useful, no fluff.
Follow The Decoder for AI news, background stories and expert analyses.
The Decoder：https://the-decoder.com/
Scan to open this article