Anthropic has expanded its Cyber Verification Program, creating tiered access to advanced model capabilities for qualified security professionals. The programme is designed to reduce blocking for legitimate defensive work while keeping the most sensitive capabilities behind organisational verification.

The new structure distinguishes vulnerability research and incident response from authorised penetration testing and red-team activity. The latter tier is limited to organisations that apply and are accepted. Anthropic says the programme grew out of Project Glasswing, an industry initiative involving technology companies, financial institutions and open-source organisations.

The company reports that partner work associated with the initiative has helped identify more than 100,000 software vulnerabilities this year, while Anthropic's own open-source scanning found another 5,500 verified issues between April and October. Those figures are company-reported and reflect a mix of partner activity and Anthropic scanning, not a controlled benchmark of model performance.

The development sharpens a central governance problem for frontier models: the same capabilities that help defenders reproduce and patch vulnerabilities can also lower barriers for attackers. Verification, permitted-use controls, logging and rapid revocation therefore become part of the product itself. Enterprises assessing cyber-capable models should examine not only benchmark scores, but also who receives elevated access and how misuse is detected.

Execution Level Governance- What audit-ready agent governance actually looks like
David Girvin, founder and CEO of Assury argues that model-in-the-loop review, AI governing AI, is fundamentally unreliable for regulated environments: even the best-performing models miss a meaningful share of violations, the reviewing model is typically provided by the same vendor being reviewed, and prompt injection or context poisoning can compromise both the acting agent and its supposed overseer simultaneously. He makes the case for deterministic, architecturally enforced controls instead, walking through Assury’s approach of autonomy zones, session risk accumulation, and credential starvation, which lets a compromised agent be cut off from its tools instantly rather than relying on time-boxed access. The conversation touches on why David is sceptical of just-in-time credentialing as a solution for agent security more broadly, since agent sessions don’t run on predictable human timescales, along with the current gap between how identity and security vendors are pitching agent protection and what he sees happening at the execution layer in practice. He also discusses the compliance and audit implications of probabilistic decision-making, arguing that regulated industries will increasingly need tamper-evident, hash-chained audit trails that can withstand scrutiny from auditors and regulators who are only beginning to understand agentic risk, and reflects on a named frontier lab’s own published framework as an example of the gap between research and practitioner reality. Elsewhere, David reflects candidly on building a bootstrapped security company in an increasingly crowded market, why he turned down aggressive VC funding to stay in control of the product, and what a credible third-party assessment of his own gateway would need to look like given that Assury sits directly in the execution path for every customer’s agents.
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