The company announced Unit 42 Continuous Frontier AI Defense on September 22, an always-on offensive security service sold as an annual subscription and available worldwide.
The service routes security tasks to the AI model best suited for each job, including Anthropic's Claude Mythos 5 and OpenAI's GPT-5.6-Cyber, alongside open-weight models. Both OpenAI and Anthropic provided launch quotes for the announcement.
Continuous testing replaces the annual audit
Unlike traditional penetration tests, which snapshot a network's defenses at a single point in time, the new service begins with a full-estate baseline scan and then keeps testing as environments change.
It probes web applications, APIs, cloud infrastructure, source code repositories and network assets for exploitable weaknesses, validates end-to-end attack paths, and returns prioritized fixes with code-level guidance and virtual patch recommendations.
Palo Alto Networks' own research underpins the multi-model approach: no single AI model catches more than 40 percent of vulnerabilities, and its two gated models overlap on fewer than 10 percent of findings. Subscription options vary depending on which OpenAI, Anthropic and open-weight models a customer uses.
Internal tests found a year's exposures in three weeks
The company says it spent $17 million and six months developing the approach, running it internally and applying it in more than 100 customer engagements. During internal testing, the system surfaced what the company would ordinarily expect to find in a year of penetration testing — in just three weeks.
Customer assessments also found exposures at every organization tested, with 37 percent rated high or critical severity. More than two-thirds of exposures found in third-party applications had no known CVE number, Palo Alto Networks said — noting that these figures come from its own testing and have not been independently verified.
Fighting AI with AI
The launch comes as attackers compress breach cycles "by almost 97 percent in some cases, from weeks to hours," according to the company.
"AI is probably the largest inflection point that we have ever seen, more than the internet, more than the cloud... we are only at the beginning of the AI world," Meerah Rajavel, chief information officer of Palo Alto Networks, said in an interview with Business Day.
The service extends the company's point-in-time Frontier AI Exposure Analysis launched in April. Palo Alto Networks is the world's largest dedicated cybersecurity company by revenue, valued at roughly $320 billion — making it one of the market's largest bets on corporate security spending.
By Hamza Faisal
