Cisco’s new Antares models are small enough to run on your own machines. And, it claims, they beat Google’s Gemini and rival GPT-class systems at finding bugs. It is releasing them open-weight, though it is vetting who gets access.
The pitch from Cisco is a quiet rebuke to the frontier-model arms race. You do not need a giant, pricey AI to hunt for software bugs. And you should not have to ship your source code to OpenAI or Google to do it.
Cisco’s Foundation AI team has released two open-weight security models, Antares-350M and Antares-1B, built to find known vulnerabilities buried in existing codebases. They sit on Hugging Face for the community, though Cisco is approving access case by case. It is holding a larger 3-billion-parameter model back from a full public release.
These are not chatbots. Antares works a repository like a human investigator. It starts from a vulnerability description, searches the code, and reads candidate files. It backtracks when a path leads nowhere, then returns a ranked list of the files most likely to hide a flaw. The name comes from the red supergiant star, roughly 1,000 times the size of the sun.
Small yet mighty
