Microsoft opened public preview on August 3 for Project Perception, an agentic security system it first unveiled on July 27 alongside MAI-Cyber-1-Flash, the company's first cybersecurity-specific in-house model. The platform is initially available through Microsoft Defender, with support for additional Microsoft Security products planned to follow.

How the agents divide the work

Project Perception organizes its AI agents into three roles modeled on a security operations team. Red agents probe an environment for exploitable paths the way an attacker would, looking for weaknesses before real adversaries find them. Blue agents investigate the signals red agents and existing telemetry surface, triaging which findings represent genuine risk rather than noise. Green agents then write and deploy the fixes — patching configurations and hardening defenses. Microsoft says high-impact actions still require human sign-off rather than running fully autonomously, and the three agent types are meant to hand off findings to each other through orchestrated workflows instead of relying on manual handoffs between security teams.

MAI-Cyber-1-Flash and benchmark results

Underpinning the agents is MAI-Cyber-1-Flash, a model Microsoft built specifically to reason over security-specific data and threats rather than adapting a general-purpose model. On CyberGym, a public benchmark covering 1,507 vulnerability-reproduction tasks, Microsoft reported that its detection system running on MAI-Cyber-1-Flash scored 95.95%. Pricing is consumption-based, metered in what Microsoft calls Security Compute Units (SCUs), with more demanding agent tasks consuming units at a higher rate than lighter ones.

Why it matters

Project Perception is Microsoft's clearest bet yet that security operations should shift from agents that alert humans to agents that act — probing, triaging and patching with a human only in the loop for consequential decisions. It also extends Microsoft's push to ship purpose-built models rather than routing every workload through general-purpose ones, following a similar pattern to its other specialized in-house releases this year. For an industry already worried about AI being used offensively, Microsoft is explicitly betting that agentic defense can outpace agentic attack — a wager the security industry will be watching closely as Project Perception moves from preview toward general availability.