Microsoft Announces AI Security Agents - 1

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Microsoft Announces AI Security Agents

  • Written by Kiara Fabbri Former Tech News Writer
  • Fact-Checked by Sarah Frazier Former Content Manager

Microsoft has introduced a new set of AI-powered security agents aimed at helping organizations defend against cyber threats, including phishing and data breaches.

In a rush? Here are the quick facts:

  • Microsoft introduced AI agents to automate security tasks and detect cyberthreats.
  • The AI tools operate within Microsoft’s Zero Trust security framework.
  • These tools help security teams focus on complex threats instead of routine tasks.

The latest updates to Microsoft Security Copilot, announced on March 24, 2025, expand its capabilities by introducing autonomous AI agents designed to assist security teams.

The move comes as cyberattacks continue to rise in volume and complexity, often overwhelming human security teams. Microsoft reports that it detects over 30 billion phishing emails annually and processes 84 trillion security signals per day. These threats include 7,000 password attacks per second, as explained in the announcement.

Among the new AI agents is the Phishing Triage Agent in Microsoft Defender, which can automatically analyze phishing emails to distinguish real threats from false alarms. Other agents focus on data security, insider threats, and vulnerability management.

Microsoft stated that its AI agents help security teams by automating routine tasks, allowing them to focus on complex cyberthreats. The company highlighted that these tools are integrated within its Zero Trust framework, ensuring security teams maintain control.

In addition to Microsoft’s own agents, five AI security agents developed by third-party partners will also be available. For instance, the OneTrust Privacy Breach Response Agent assists organizations in analyzing data breaches to comply with privacy regulations.

Blake Brannon, Chief Product and Strategy Officer at OneTrust, called this “game-changing” for the industry, saying, “Autonomous AI agents will help our customers scale, augment, and increase the effectiveness of their privacy operations.”

Additionally, the announcement states that Microsoft Defender will now extend AI security posture management beyond Azure and AWS to include Google VertexAI and other AI models. New detection tools are set to also help security teams identify AI-specific threats, such as indirect prompt injection attacks and data leaks.

The updates, including enhanced phishing protections for Microsoft Teams, will roll out starting in April 2025.

Arc Prize Foundation Launches Challenging New AGI Benchmark, Exposing AI Weaknesses - 2

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Arc Prize Foundation Launches Challenging New AGI Benchmark, Exposing AI Weaknesses

  • Written by Andrea Miliani Former Tech News Expert
  • Fact-Checked by Sarah Frazier Former Content Manager

The non-profit Arc Prize Foundation announced a new benchmark, ARC-AGI-2, to challenge frontier AI models on reasoning and human-level capacities on Monday. The organization also announced a new contest, ARC Prize 2025, that will take place from March to November, and the winner will earn a $700,000 Grand Prize.

In a rush? Here are the quick facts:

  • The Arc Prize Foundation launched a new benchmark called ARC-AGI-2 to test AI models on human-level reasoning skills.
  • Current top AI models failed the test, scoring between 0.0% and 4%, while humans scored up to 100%.
  • The non-profit organization also announced the competition ARC Prize 2025 for the benchmark, and the winner will earn a $700,000 prize.

According to the information shared by the organization, the most popular AI models in the market haven’t been able to surpass a 4% score on ARC-AGI-2, while humans can easily solve the test.

“Today we’re excited to launch ARC-AGI-2 to challenge the new frontier,” states the announcement . “ARC-AGI-2 is even harder for AI (in particular, AI reasoning systems), while maintaining the same relative ease for humans.”

ARC-AGI-2 is the second edition of the organization’s benchmark, ARC-AGI-1, launched in 2019. On the previous test, only OpenAI’s o3 successfully scored 85% in December 2024 .

This new version focuses on tasks that are easy for humans and hard for AI models—or impossible until now. Unlike other benchmarks, ARC-AGI-2 doesn’t consider PhD skills or superhuman capabilities, instead, tasks evaluate adaptation capacity and problem-solving skills by applying existing knowledge.

Arc Prize explained that every task in the test was solved by humans in less than 2 attempts, and AI models must comply with similar rules, considering the lowest costs. The test includes symbolic interpretation—AI models must understand symbols beyond visual patterns—, considering simultaneous rules, and rules that change depending on context—something most AI reasoning systems fail at.

The organization tested the new benchmark with humans and public AI models. Human panels scored 100% and 60% while popular frontier systems such as DeepSeek’s R1 and R1-zero scored 0.3%, and GPT-4.5’s pure LLM and o3-mini-high scored 0.0%. OpenAI’s o3-low using Chain-of-Thought reasoning, search, and synthesis reached an estimate of 4%, at a high cost per task.

Arc Prize also launched the latest open-source contest, ARC Prize 2025, hosted between March and November at the popular online platform Kaggle. The first team to reach a score higher than 85%—and a $2.5/task efficiency—on the ARC-AGI-2 benchmark will earn a $700,000 Grand Prize. There will also be paper awards and other prizes for top scores.

The foundation said that more details will be provided on the official website and in the upcoming days.