Microsoft is turning to AI to help protect users from attacks and hacks, leveraging a new class of models that can find and exploit software flaws faster than any person could on their own.

Part of that includes the company’s new Microsoft Security multimodal agentic scanning harness, or MDASH. The platform, which Microsoft said is in an expanded preview, uses AI agents to scan for software vulnerabilities that hackers can exploit.

Speed is a key component of cybersecurity. The faster a company can detect a software flaw, the sooner it can fix the flaw before hackers can exploit it.

“AI brings a lot of superpowers to defenders, but also AI in the hands of cyber attackers is a very powerful tool,” Vasu Jakkal, corporate vice president of security at Microsoft, told Yahoo Finance.

“The time between vulnerability discovery to exploitation essentially collapses … and if we don’t build on this technology with context for defenders, that is going to continue to be a very asymmetric cyber war across the industry,” she added.