Cyber defenders are fighting a new kind of offense. Attackers have gone agentic. AI has given them speed, scale, and sophistication that removes the skills needed to execute advanced, widespread attacks that was impossible just a few years ago. What once required deep expertise and significant resources can now be done by anyone with access to the right AI tools.
Anthropic's Mythos model autonomously discovered thousands of zero-day vulnerabilities across every major operating system and browser—flaws that survived decades of human review and millions of automated security tests. Work that once took a specialist team weeks now happens in hours. AI is compressing the window between vulnerability discovery and weaponization to near zero. Multiple frontier AI models—including OpenAI's GPT-5.4-Cyber and Google's Big Sleep—already possess comparable capabilities and more will follow. The era of AI-accelerated attacks at scale is here. AI has given attackers three structural advantages:
Speed: AI-powered tools automate full attack cycles in minutes. The fastest exfiltration time recorded in 2025 was 6 minutes, based on ReliaQuest threat research.
Scale: AI allows simultaneous targeting of thousands of organizations. What once required an army now runs on a single prompt.
Skills Barriers Removed: Any actor with access to the right AI model can launch advanced, adaptive, targeted attacks at enterprise scale. AI tools like Mythos are clear demonstrations of this being a reality.
Meanwhile, the attack surface keeps expanding, and enterprise data is scattered across EDR, email, network, cloud, and SIEM. It exists in the hands of VIP employees traveling across the globe, partners, contractors, and customers. It lives on the open, deep, and dark web. It grows with every new acquisition, new business unit, new geography, and every new software the enterprise adopts—especially AI software.
Defenders must secure everything, everywhere, all the time. Yet most businesses still treat their security as something a team does in a room by watching the alert queue. A SOC team, a set of tools, an MSSP on call—that sufficed when threats were slow, data lived in one place, and human analysts could be stationary and keep up. That world doesn’t exist anymore. Security teams are more mobile and spread out than ever, just like the businesses they defend. Organizations must understand that security operations is not a cost-center, it’s the defense layer of the business, defending them from constant attacks.
The Market's Failed Response
The security market hasn’t helped. Instead of giving defenders a real solution, it keeps offering options that add complexity without fixing the architecture underneath:
Option 1: Centralize in a SIEM: Too expensive, too slow, requires per-tool query language and syntax knowledge that prevents acquiring headcount and talent, and leads to coverage gaps because you cannot store everything. This model once worked when threats moved slowly and a handful of tools covered the perimeter. That is not the case today.
Option 2: Outsource to MDR / MSSP: You lose control, speed, and the ability to tailor defense to your business. They are single-threaded and only look at a single tool in your environment. It is a black box that only specializes in one specific type or brand of tool management, eliminating the network effect across a wide span of customers.
Option 3: Increase Headcount: More humans doing human-speed work against machine-speed attacks slows response time down. Analysts drown in mundane work, always feel behind, and burn out because their talent is being wasted.
Option 4: AI Tools: Siloed AI capabilities across DCIR, startups without the operational depth to accurately work in production, and AI within the more established platforms cannot act beyond their own data. Most are not truly autonomous, and none have a consistent pricing model. They charge per token, per query, per investigation—passing unpredictable and uncontrolled AI costs directly to their customers. As usage scales, costs spike. As new models emerge, defenders cannot take advantage without re-procurement or heavy integration management.
Option 5: Build vs. Buy: Requires the specialized expertise, infrastructure, and time most organizations do not have. Accuracy is unproven at scale.
Attackers have gone agentic, gaining speed, scale, and the removal of skills barriers. But the same benefits attackers gain from AI can be given to defenders. Agentic AI can make them defend faster across any environment with a lowered skills barrier. You must defend AI with AI.
Agentic Defense: Defending AI with AI
Security operations is the defense layer of every organization—the team, the processes, the technologies working together to protect the business. When facing AI-accelerated attacks, that defense layer must become agentic.
Agentic defense is the application of agentic AI to existing security operations people, processes, and technology to make the defense faster, more accurate, and more fortified against the AI-accelerated attacks coming at it. The same foundation, now powered by agentic AI, defends AI-accelerated attacks at machine speed with near-perfect accuracy across the entire environment.
This means making the work defenders already do—detection, investigation, hunting, response, intelligence research—operate autonomously at scale. Detections are built and deployed by AI as new threats emerge. Threat hunts are executed across the entire environment autonomously before an analyst has to ask. Every alert is investigated immediately, with no queue. Gaps in coverage are identified and closed before an attacker finds them. When the entire security operation becomes agentic, threat discovery and response initiates in seconds.
ReliaQuest GreyMatter: Agentic Defense for the Enterprise
ReliaQuest GreyMatter, the agentic AI security operations platform, is the agentic defense layer for the enterprise. It levels the playing field and gives defenders the same three structural advantages agentic AI gives attackers, plus an added cost benefit:
Speed: Lightning Fast with Near-Perfect Accuracy GreyMatter agentic AI detects threats in seconds and contains them in under 5 minutes at 99.4% accuracy—the highest in the industry, proven across 1,300+ enterprises.
Scale: Defend Across Any Environment GreyMatter operates across 250+ technologies—SIEM, EDR, cloud, network, email, OT, and AI applications—across multi-cloud, hybrid, and M&A environments simultaneously. The attack surface keeps expanding. GreyMatter scales with it without requiring data centralization or additional headcount.
Skills Barriers Removed: Any Defender Can Operate at the Highest Level GreyMatter removes the skill barrier that has always limited who can participate in security operations. Any defender can defend any threat in plain language. It has six autonomous agentic systems, called GreyMatter Agentic Teammates, that deliver 3X the output of the existing security team without adding headcount—working continuously across every discipline, 24/7, without burnout or shift gaps.
Cost Efficiency: $2 to $4 Back for Every $1 Spent GreyMatter’s AI Model Broker controls AI cost at the infrastructure level—selecting the most cost-effective model for each task. The result is flat, predictable, unlimited pricing. No tokens, no queries, no per-investigation charges. Customers consistently re-architect their security environment for efficiency and see $2 to $4 in return for every $1 they spend.
GreyMatter gives any defender the ability to harness AI to detect threats, run investigations, and execute response faster across their entire tech stack in plain language, without needing to be an expert in every tool they own. The result is an AI defense prepared for any AI accelerated attack.
The Time to Level the Playing Field
Attackers have gone agentic and the threat is not slowing down. AI has fundamentally changed the rules. The window between vulnerability discovery and exploitation has collapsed. The volume of attacks is increasing. The sophistication is accelerating.
Organizations that transform their defense layer now—while attackers are still learning how to use these same AI capabilities offensively—will have a structural advantage.
ReliaQuest is an agentic AI cybersecurity company whose platform, GreyMatter, serves as the agentic defense for the enterprise—defending organizations against AI-accelerated attacks.
