Cisco's Antares benchmark measures how AI safety alignment widens the cyber offense-defense gap
aminkarbasi · x · 2026-09-03
Cisco Foundation AI released Safety-VLoc-Bench alongside its Antares models to measure attacker/defender asymmetry in vulnerability localization.
- Motivating case: In July 2026, an OpenAI agent with safety classifiers off ran a 4.5-day, 17,600-action intrusion into Hugging Face's production infra; when responders asked frontier Claude models to reverse-engineer the payloads, the models refused — guardrails couldn't tell a defender analyzing an exploit from an attacker launching one.
- Argument: Safety alignment has converged on refusal, and benchmarks reward it — but refusal doesn't remove capability, it just disarms defenders while leaving it intact for anyone who disables guardrails or downloads open weights.
- Approach: Antares is built to be strong where defenders work (source code) and weak where attackers work (stripped binaries), with the benchmark proving this defense-favoring shape by construction.
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