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Last week, OpenAI admitted that its models had hacked Hugging Face during an internal cybersecurity test. Hungging Face had previously disclosed the attack without knowing who was responsible, using AI to detect the intrusion and analyze more than 17,000 recorded actions.
Both companies ended up working together, as they showcased how quickly AI is changing the cybersecurity game. AI can search for weak points and carry out attacks faster than humans, but it also helps defenders understand and respond to attacks at the same speed.
Those capabilities are becoming easier to access. Last week, Google released Gemini 3.5 Flash Cyber, a lightweight model trained to find, validate, and patch vulnerabilities. On the same day, Cisco introduced Antares, a series of small open-weight models that companies can repeatedly run over their own codebases to locate known flaws.
Image credit: Made by Tech in Asia with the help of AI
These releases point to a future where companies can evaluate their software’s security more frequently and at a much lower cost. Being open-weight, Cisco’s models can run within a company’s own systems, allowing sensitive code to stay in-house rather than being sent to a third-party provider.
This matters for Southeast Asia, a long-standing hub for business process outsourcing and software services. Companies in these sectors must meet the security standards of international clients, and some of them will have to do so while relying on old or heavily customized systems that are difficult to update without disrupting operations.
As AI makes vulnerability discovery more routine, the bottleneck shifts to fixing those flaws. That creates opportunities for startups that don’t just produce more security warnings, but help companies address them.
Elsewhere in this issue, we’ve updated our tracker of Chinese tech founders in Southeast Asia, adding 21 new names and a list of investors backing their companies. The tracker now covers 63 companies, mostly based in Singapore.
We also speak with Chrissy Lim, co-founder and CEO of Singapore-based Protaigé, about which parts of marketing AI can replace and which ones still need humans.
Glenn Kaonang, journalist
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