Why Runtime Security Could Hold The Key To Defending Against AI Agents

Keeping up with vulnerabilities has become a herculean effort post AI. Just last week, CNBC reported that Bank of America hired an “army” of 1,000 contractors to help patch software vulnerabilities exposed by powerful AI models like Mythos, which can identify exploits at machine speed.

However, security vendors are looking toward faster approaches to mitigating vulnerabilities. Today, Tel Aviv-based run-time security provider Sweet Security, founded in 2023 by CEO Dror Kashti, a former CISO of the IDF, alongside CBO Eyal Fisher and CPEO Ben Ishay, announced the launch of virtual patching, which can mitigate vulnerabilities in a single click.

Sweet protects applications running in the cloud by deploying sensors to the organization’s workloads. The platform can scan for vulnerabilities, ranking them with a score. Once a new exploit is discovered, a human user can push a policy update to the sensor to mitigate the vulnerability at the network layer without changing any code. This gives engineering teams time to develop a permanent fix.

The release comes just months after a swarm of 700 AI agents breached Hugging Face’s environment in July. The incident highlighted that agents were capable of identifying and chaining together exploits, while demonstrating defenders need to move faster.

Faster Patching And AI Agents

The wind0w between vulnerability discovery and exploitation is closing, with Mandiant’s M-Trends 2026 report finding the mean time to exploit vulnerabilities dropped to an estimated -7 days. This indicates that exploitation is often occurring before a patch is released, giving attackers an opportunity to exploit systems before a defender has a chance to issue a fix.

Virtual patching targets vulnerable code paths and updates them rather than attempting to update the entire application. This enables defenders to block requests that attempt to capitalize on exploits in running workloads.