Frontier AI has compressed attack timelines from weeks to minutes. 

For defenders to gain the upper hand, they need to fight back at machine speed. That’s why Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 launched Frontier AI Defense, our comprehensive service that pairs advanced frontier AI models with leading threat intelligence to uncover hidden risks, validate real attack paths, and accelerate remediation before adversaries strike. 

Today, in a major milestone for organizations to defend themselves against AI-powered attacks, Unit 42 is expanding its Frontier AI Exposure Analysis capabilities with Anthropic’s Claude Mythos 5, giving organizations access to its advanced cyber capabilities.

Unlocking High-Fidelity Security with the Right Models, Harness and Expertise

While incredibly powerful, achieving high-fidelity results with frontier AI requires three things: the right models, an advanced harness, and the expertise to run it. With Unit 42 Frontier AI Exposure Analysis, guided and reviewed by Unit 42 experts, Claude Mythos 5 goes beyond identifying exposures. It tests whether those exposures can actually be exploited, connects weaknesses into attack paths, and helps prioritize the most urgently needed fixes. That answers the questions conventional scanners alone cannot: Is this exploitable? What can an attacker reach from here? And what should we fix first?

Further, our research shows models have different strengths. Unit 42’s multi-model approach applies the model best suited for the task, improving coverage and results while allowing us to continuously incorporate the strongest new capabilities as models advance. 

Human expertise remains at the center. Unit 42 combines these models with our offensive security experts, global Palo Alto Networks telemetry, and Unit 42 Threat Intelligence to turn model output into validated attack paths, prioritized remediation, and clear defensive action.

How It Works

Our Frontier AI Defense service uses the most advanced AI models to discover exposures, test whether they are exploitable, validate attack paths and help customers prioritize what to fix first, including: 

• Leading Cyber Models: Advanced AI applied to discovery, testing, and validation.
  
• Multi-Model Harness: Dynamic routing for stronger results, wider coverage, and managed costs.
  
• Exposure Discovery: Identification of vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, exposed credentials, and unmanaged attack surfaces across apps and networks.
  
• Advanced Adversary Simulation: Live exploitability testing and end-to-end attack path validation.
  
• Custom Remediation Plans: Prioritized fixes delivered directly into existing IT, development, and security workflows.

Security teams do not need more findings. They need to know which weaknesses lead to a viable attack path. Attackers do not think about applications, identity, cloud, and infrastructure in isolation. They look for ways to move across them to reach their objective.

By putting frontier models to work with Unit 42 experts, we can identify and validate those attack paths before attackers do, and help organizations close them first.

Visit Palo Alto Networks Frontier AI Defense to learn more.

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Unit 42 is putting the latest frontier cyber models to work across customer environments to find, validate and help remediate the attack paths that matter most.

In May, we introduced Frontier AI Defense with a warning: the window to get ahead of AI-enabled attacks was shorter than most people realized. Since then, we have briefed more than 1,000 security teams around the world and introduced our Frontier AI Defense service to hundreds of customers.

Today, through our partnership with OpenAI, we are expanding Unit 42 Frontier AI Exposure Analysis to put advanced frontier cyber models directly to work in customer environments. Under Unit 42 direction, these models can find exposures, test whether they are exploitable, validate attack paths and help customers prioritize what to fix first.

Our early work shows why this approach matters: 36% of the exposures we identified map to no known CVE, often because they involve multiple gaps that have to be discovered, chained and tested together.

Bringing the Latest Frontier Cyber Capabilities to Defenders

Palo Alto Networks has been among a limited group of organizations with early access to advanced cyber capabilities from the leading frontier AI labs. Through our partnership with OpenAI, Unit 42 can now bring its latest advanced cyber capabilities, including GPT-5.6 Daybreak, to security testing and validation for our customers. Until now, GPT-5.6 Daybreak has not been available for commercial use.

Frontier models have helped inform the work of our experts. Now they can increasingly perform complex offensive security tasks directly, at machine speed and under Unit 42 direction. That allows us to go deeper than traditional vulnerability discovery by testing exploitability, reasoning across multiple weaknesses and determining how an attacker could use them to achieve an objective.

There is no single best model for every cyber task. Our research has shown that different models have different strengths and find vulnerabilities others miss. A multi-model harness routes work to the model best suited for the task, improving efficacy and coverage while managing the cost of frontier AI at scale. As stronger models emerge, we can incorporate them without rebuilding the offering around a single model or provider.

Unit 42 experts remain central to the process. We combine frontier models with our offensive security expertise, Palo Alto Networks telemetry and Unit 42 Threat Intelligence to validate findings, connect exposures into attack paths and understand what an attacker could ultimately achieve.

Built to Find What Attackers Can Exploit

The expanded service brings five capabilities together:

• Leading cyber models: Apply the latest advanced cyber models to improve exposure discovery, testing and validation.
• Multi-model harness: Use the right model for the right task to improve efficacy, expand coverage and optimize cost.
• Exposure discovery: Find vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, leaked credentials, unmanaged attack surface and other posture gaps across applications and network assets.
• Advanced adversary simulation: Actively test exploitability and validate end-to-end attack paths to understand how an attacker could compromise the environment.
• Custom remediation plan: Prioritize the fixes that break the most important attack paths and feed those findings into existing IT, development and security workflows.

Most security teams already have more findings than they can act on. The harder problem is knowing which ones create a real path to compromise. Attackers look across applications, infrastructure, identity and cloud for weaknesses they can combine to achieve an objective. Frontier AI Exposure Analysis applies that same adversarial perspective, helping defenders understand which paths matter and what to fix first.

The Asymmetry Runs Both Ways Now

For the past several months, frontier AI has been a story about what is coming for defenders: vulnerability discovery at scale, exploit chaining that sees full-stack logic no scanner catches, and attack cycles compressed to seconds from initial access to exfiltration.

All of that is still true. Our answer has been to put everything we learn testing these frontier models into the hands of defenders. Today, that gets more direct: not just what frontier models have taught us, but the models themselves, working in your environment for your defenders before those same capabilities are working for the attacker.

The window is still closing. We intend to spend it building on the side of the defenders.

Visit Palo Alto Networks Frontier AI Defense to learn more.

The post Putting OpenAI Cyber Models to Work for Defenders appeared first on Palo Alto Networks Blog.