Cohere is hoping to make its AI platforms more resilient to cybersecurity threats by acquiring a company that detects software vulnerabilities with AI.
The news: Toronto AI company Cohere announced on Thursday that it had signed a letter of intent to acquire Prague-based AI cybersecurity company Aisle, which develops tools to identify software vulnerabilities. Aisle’s Prague headquarters, which hosts an engineering hub, will become Cohere’s Prague office, the company said. Aisle’s approximately 50 full-time employees will all join Cohere, an Aisle spokesperson told BetaKit.
Aisle CEO Ondřej Vlček will join Cohere as senior vice-president of a new cybersecurity unit called Cohere Cyber, while co-founder Jaya Baloo will become Cohere’s global chief information security officer. Aisle co-founder and CTO Stanislav Fort will become Cohere’s vice-president of AI security.
From the source: “There are meaningful gaps in solutions available for [cyber] defenders, and many are having to make the difficult tradeoff between securing their systems and exposing their [intellectual property] and telemetry to a provider that does “zero data-retention” performatively,” Cohere co-founder Ivan Zhang wrote in an X post. With Aisle, Cohere will “continue to empower defenders with a truly sovereign platform that they can fully trust to secure their most critical systems.”
The context: AI cybersecurity threats have taken on new urgency for governments and enterprises since OpenAI revealed that its agents organized to hack the AI platform Hugging Face. Since then, other AI giants, like Anthropic and Google, have also disclosed hacking incidents, and the Canadian government said there had been an attempted agentic hack of Library and Archives Canada.
Aisle was launched just a year ago by Vlček, the former CEO of antivirus company Avast, and Baloo and Fort, the latter of whom worked at Anthropic and DeepMind. It develops AI products that identify and fix security weaknesses in critical software—a capability that Cohere is hoping to bring to its platform for large companies and governments. The company drew attention this week when it claimed that its AI security system found 18 of the 24 vulnerabilities addressed in the latest release of curl, a widely used software tool for API transfer, while models from Anthropic and OpenAI found no issues.
Final thought: This move will see Cohere continue its shopping spree of European AI talent. It’s set to acquire Germany’s Aleph Alpha, subject to regulatory approvals, and also bought Montréal- and Berlin-based Reliant AI as it looks to develop a sovereign AI alternative for organizations wary of reliance on US AI giants. The German deals coincided with Canada and Germany’s digital ministers working closer together on tech policy—whether a similar scenario will play out with Czechia is unclear.
Image courtesy ALL IN. Photo by Melanie Olmstead Photographe.
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