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Microsoft’s AI chief has said the hacking spree by a rogue OpenAI model was a “warning shot” for the rise of AI-enabled cyber attacks, as the company released a security product that it said outperforms rivals at lower costs.
Mustafa Suleyman, chief executive of AI at Microsoft and a DeepMind co-founder, said OpenAI’s admission last week that one of its AI “agents” had escaped a test environment to attack start-up Hugging Face was an “important lesson”.
“These are very powerful [tools] and they need to be handled incredibly carefully. And we need extreme attention to detail,” he told the FT in an interview. “The precautionary principle is going to matter here as the models get more and more powerful and I think it’s a warning shot.”
Suleyman’s remarks come amid growing alarm about how AI’s ability to detect and exploit software vulnerabilities could transform cyber security following the release of Anthropic’s powerful Mythos model in April.
OpenAI has faced criticism that its relentless push to quickly develop more powerful tools to compete with Anthropic contributed to the Hugging Face incident, highlighting the risks in the race for AI cyber tools.
Microsoft’s security chief Hayete Gallot said there was “no choice” but to push the frontier of cyber capabilities to create defences against “relentless” autonomous AI attacks that are emerging for Microsoft’s customers.
“Attackers have [these] models. So we have to evaluate and push so that the defenders can defend,” she said. “It’s not like we have a choice.”
Microsoft on Monday announced a dedicated cyber security model, MAI-Cyber-1-Flash, that it said — when combined with OpenAI’s GPT 5.4 — ranked higher than Anthropic and OpenAI’s best cyber offerings on a core industry benchmark.
Suleyman has been leading Microsoft’s pursuit of “true self-sufficiency” in AI after it restructured its relationship with OpenAI.
While pursuing technological independence from OpenAI, Suleyman argued that using the smaller MAI-Cyber-1-Flash on top of GPT achieved lower costs for customers.
The software giant said its own AI model would “efficiently handle” 90 per cent of all user tasks, but OpenAI’s models were still used for “exceptionally hard tasks”.
Suleyman said using a technical architecture called a “harness” is sufficient to create significant capabilities and built-in safeguards, adding the new tool was 50 per cent cheaper to run than using OpenAI’s model exclusively.
The release highlights the competitive pressure on OpenAI and Anthropic, which face fast-moving rivals in China that offer near-equal capabilities with lower running costs.
Microsoft said a preview of the product would initially be available to select customers.
