AI Cybersecurity Becomes a Major Growth Market

AI cybersecurity is emerging as a major growth opportunity for OpenAI and Anthropic as concerns over rogue AI and model misuse intensify. Anthropic’s threat intelligence report detailed how bad actors used Claude, while OpenAI promoted the cybersecurity capabilities of its latest models. Founders said frontier AI systems can identify, patch and exploit software vulnerabilities far faster than traditional tools. Modal co-founder Erik Bernhardsson said his company uses AI as a partial replacement for costly security consultants. Town co-founder Jean-Denis Greze said continuous security monitoring had become more affordable because of AI cybersecurity tools. The market opportunity comes as leading AI labs seek new revenue sources beyond coding assistants and agentic software. OpenAI reportedly has an annualised revenue run rate above $40 billion, while Anthropic has reportedly exceeded $65 billion. However, Ramp data indicates that some businesses are becoming more cautious about AI spending as token costs decline. Uber, for example, has increased agent usage while reducing its cost per 1,000 model requests by nearly 34% from its peak. The article also highlights Mistral’s €3 billion funding round at a €21 billion valuation. The French company may be shifting from challenging OpenAI directly towards enterprise deployments, infrastructure and hosting third-party open-source models. Separately, inference provider Baseten acquired AI-agent infrastructure startup Blaxel for about $300 million, signalling continued demand for tools that support autonomous software agents.