Cisco releases Antares, open-weight small models for locating code vulnerabilities
Cisco Systems Inc. today introduced Antares, a family of small language models built to pinpoint where known security vulnerabilities sit inside a codebase, and released the first two as open-weight downloads on Hugging Face.
The models come from Cisco Foundation AI, the company’s research and engineering group focused on security-specific artificial intelligence. Antares targets vulnerability localization, the work of connecting external vulnerability data such as public databases, advisories and Common Weakness Enumeration entries to the specific files in a repository where a flaw is likely to live.
That step is one of the slower and more expensive parts of software security. Analysts have to search unfamiliar code, follow naming conventions, trace call paths and compare candidate files before deciding whether a weakness is actually present. Antares is designed to narrow that search.
Two models are available now, Antares-350M and Antares-1B, with a larger Antares-3B model due to follow. All are small enough to run locally, which lets security teams keep sensitive source code inside their own environment rather than sending it to a cloud service. Cisco is pitching that as a fit for universities, public-sector bodies, nonprofits and smaller security teams that lack the budget for token-heavy commercial models.
