CEOInterviews.AI
Start App
Jeetendra Patel
President & Chief Product Officer, Cisco

Anthropic & OpenAI Are Hardening Cisco Infrastructure | Jeetu Patel

📅 Sep 15, 2026 MTS 15 MIN 753 VIEWS 36 SEGMENTS · 2 SPEAKERS
Jeetu Patel joins MTS to discuss Cisco's partnerships with Anthropic and OpenAI on AI-powered vulnerability detection, the shift from human-scale to machine-scale cybersecurity defense, and how AI automation is changing engineering bottlenecks from coding to taste and judgment. Check out our sponsor Lovable: ⁠https://lovable.dev.⁠ Turn ideas into software people love. -- ⁠https://x.com/jpatel41⁠ -- MTS is a live news and interview show covering technology, business, politics, and culture as it happens. Follow MTS:  X |⁠ ⁠⁠⁠  / mtslive⁠⁠   YouTube |⁠ ⁠⁠⁠   / @mtsituation   Spotify |⁠ ⁠https://...

What Jeetendra Patel said

Written from the verified transcript and checked against it. Every figure links to the moment it was said.

Jeetu Patel, Cisco's President and Chief Product Officer, discussed the company's collaborations with Anthropic and OpenAI on frontier AI systems for security. He highlighted the extreme speed of exploits (7-9 minutes) versus the lengthy patch time (45 days), arguing that current security systems are inadequate and need rearchitecting. He noted that only 20% of vulnerabilities get patched due to resource constraints, and proposed that agentic security operations centers could enable defense at machine scale. Patel stressed the importance of token costs decreasing for affordability and emphasized that defenders might gain an advantage for the first time in cybersecurity history due to AI and data advantages. He also touched on the changing role of humans, with trust in agents being earned over time, and drew parallels to coding automation where new bottlenecks emerge.

Key takeaways

  1. Cisco has 32,000 engineers using OpenAI's Codex and expects 70% of its portfolio to be AI-written by end of next year.
  2. Patel said exploits occur in 7-9 minutes but patches take 45 days, necessitating rearchitecting security.
  3. Only 20% of vulnerabilities found are patched; 80% go unaddressed due to resource limits.
  4. Cisco is working with Anthropic on Project Glasswing and OpenAI on Project Daybreak to harden infrastructure.
  5. Patel believes defenders could gain an advantage over attackers for the first time in cybersecurity history.

Numbers and commitments

FigureWhat it refers toTypeAt
7 to 9 minutes Time from vulnerability announcement to exploit metric 0:17
45 days Time to apply a patch to infrastructure metric 5:12
20% Percentage of vulnerabilities patched metric 5:30
80% Percentage of vulnerabilities unaddressed metric 5:30
32,000 Number of Cisco engineers using Codex metric 1:14
70% Portfolio to be AI-written by end of next year commitment 1:14
$63 billion Cisco's revenue metric 1:14

Chapters

  1. 0:00Exploit speed vs. patch time
  2. 1:06Partnerships with Anthropic and OpenAI
  3. 1:57Critical infrastructure protection
  4. 2:22Projects Glasswing and Daybreak
  5. 5:30Agentic security operations centers
  6. 6:44Human bottleneck and AI trust
  7. 8:48Token costs and affordability
  8. 11:10Defender advantage possibility

Questions asked in this interview

7
  1. 1:06Can you tell me a little bit more about that project?
  2. 1:57What's been happening lately in AI cybersecurity that made Cisco decide this is super necessary now?
  3. 4:12What did you learn from working with both of them?
  4. 6:44So is the whole idea of having humans in the loop maybe the slowest part of this entire system?
  5. 8:48Do you think there's a part that humans still should always stay in the loop for, that maybe an AI agent that's supposed to be on the defense here should never actually fully autonomously replace?
  6. 11:10Yeah. Where does this play out?
  7. 12:31What are the cybersecurity, what are the vulnerability risks here?
Jeetendra Patel 0:00 ↗
7 to 9 minutes.
7 to 9 minutes. I was going to say an hour.
Sophia 0:04 ↗
7 to 9 minutes is way worse.
Jeetendra Patel 0:05 ↗
Yeah. Then you start thinking about, okay, so how long does it take for a patch to be applied to infrastructure from the time that a vulnerability is announced? About 45 days.
Sophia 0:15 ↗
Oh gosh, really? 45 days.
Jeetendra Patel 0:17 ↗
The exploit starts happening in 7 minutes. The bad actors, the adversaries are already attacking your system within 7 to 9 minutes, and it's taking you 45 days to go out and do a patch. So the current system simply does not work. What you have to do is fundamentally rearchitect it.
Sophia 0:34 ↗
Hello everyone and welcome back to MTS. Today I am joined by G2 Patel, who is the president and chief product officer at Cisco, and he oversees Cisco's product portfolio across networking, security, compute, Splunk, silicon, and the infrastructure companies are now rebuilding for AI. But one of the exciting news is that Cisco is also working with both Anthropic and OpenAI on frontier AI systems designed to find security vulnerabilities before attackers do. So G2, welcome to MTS.
Jeetendra Patel 1:03 ↗
Thank you for having me, Sophia. And it's great to be here.
Sophia 1:06 ↗
Excited to have you. I would love to learn a little bit about what you guys are working on with Anthropic and OpenAI. Can you tell me a little bit more about that project?
Jeetendra Patel 1:14 ↗
Sure. It's actually a multitude of projects, but we've been working with the frontier labs for a while now, where we are also investors in Anthropic. But you know, with OpenAI, Codex was — we were the first design partner for Codex. We have 32,000 engineers; they all use Codex. We will have about half a dozen products that'll be fully written with AI by the end of the year. 70% of our portfolio will hopefully be fully written with AI by the end of next year. So when you think about $63 billion of revenue at that scale, having AI so broadly proliferated, it wouldn't have happened without the partnerships we've had with these companies, and you know, a lot of debt of gratitude from us to them.
Sophia 1:57 ↗
That's pretty exciting. I know you guys are working directly with Anthropic on the project Glasswing, and you're working with OpenAI on Daybreak, right? And so what my understanding is is that you actually get to put this frontier AI against your own software, and you're using it to find vulnerabilities before attackers actually do that. What's been happening lately in AI cybersecurity that made Cisco decide this is super necessary now?
Jeetendra Patel 2:22 ↗
Yeah, I mean, look, the thing is, is we are — the way you should think about us is we are critical infrastructure for the critical infrastructure. So what happens if you have a cyber attack with a hospital or a power plant or, you know, a water supply, a water company, is like lives can get lost. And if your hospital goes down, before you know it, you can't get dialysis. If your power goes out in three, four days, you know, a city runs out of food supply. And so like there's meaningful dire consequences that can happen as a ripple effect of a cyber attack. And these cyber attacks now are happening at machine scale. And when Mythos first came out, Anthropic, you got to give them a lot of credit. What they did was they said, 'Let's not roll this out to everyone. Let's make sure that we take it out to just a select few people so that we can really learn,' because it knew how to go out and identify vulnerabilities at a much, much faster pace than what we've ever seen before.
Sophia 3:25 ↗
Wow.
Jeetendra Patel 3:25 ↗
And so what we did was we hardened our infrastructure as a result of being part of Project Glasswing, which by the way is not just good for Cisco, it's good for the entire world because a substantial percentage of traffic in the world goes through Cisco infrastructure. So it's important that we don't have that get compromised. And so we've done that not just with Glasswing with Anthropic, but we've also done that with Project Daybreak with OpenAI. And I think both of them are great partners that are actually, you know, they sometimes might get a bad rap, but they're really concerned about security. And the people that we talk to, you know, it's yes, we talk to Sam and Dario and all those folks, but the people we talk to within those labs, they really, really, really care about making sure that the world is safe and secure.
Sophia 4:12 ↗
Yeah. No, that's really interesting to understand from the inside because both Anthropic and OpenAI, of course, as you alluded to, deeply, deeply care about security. One thing I want to get from your perspective though, because you do get to work with both of these companies and you get to work with them on these different projects, do their systems have different types of approaches to finding these vulnerabilities and problems? What did you learn from working with both of them?
Jeetendra Patel 4:37 ↗
I think they keep going. It's not as much about the approach but the ease and the speed at which you can find them and then what can you do about those problems that you find, because one of the challenges that you have is just finding problems and not doing something about them doesn't really help much. Yes, you need to know what the problems are. The challenge that you have is from the time that a vulnerability is announced in the market to the time that you have an exploit happen is — take a guess, Sophia. How long do you think an exploit takes from the time a vulnerability is announced?
Sophia 5:07 ↗
Oh my gosh. 7 to 9 minutes.
Jeetendra Patel 5:09 ↗
7 to 9 minutes. I was going to say an hour.

17 more exchanges in this transcript

Sign in free to read the rest of this interview. No card required.

Sign in to read the full transcript

Cite this transcript

APA, MLA, BibTeX
APA

Patel, J. (2026, September 15). Anthropic & OpenAI Are Hardening Cisco Infrastructure | Jeetu Patel [Interview transcript]. MTS. CEOInterviews.AI. https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/2999228/

MLA

Jeetendra Patel. "Anthropic & OpenAI Are Hardening Cisco Infrastructure | Jeetu Patel." MTS, 15 Sep. 2026. Transcript, CEOInterviews.AI, https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/2999228/.

BibTeX
@misc{patel2026_2999228,
  author       = {Jeetendra Patel},
  title        = {Anthropic \& OpenAI Are Hardening Cisco Infrastructure | Jeetu Patel},
  howpublished = {Interview transcript, MTS. CEOInterviews.AI},
  year         = {2026},
  month        = {sep},
  url          = {https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/2999228/},
  note         = {Speaker-attributed transcript with timestamps}
}