Defending the future: Our commitment to responsible AI in cybersecurity

In the rapidly evolving landscape of cyber threats, artificial intelligence is no longer a luxury: it's a necessity. At Sophos, we recognized this reality early: we've been integrating sophisticated AI capabilities across our product portfolio since 2017.

This deep, practical expertise has allowed us to build the industry's largest AI-native security platform, combining both predictive machine learning (ML) and revolutionary generative AI (GenAI) to deliver faster detection and smarter, more automated responses.

However, power requires principle. Our long-standing commitment to leveraging AI for defense is governed by a framework designed to ensure that our technologies are not only effective but are also developed and deployed with the highest standards of safety, ethics, and trust.

The six pillars of our responsible AI framework

Our approach to responsible AI in cybersecurity is built on six core principles, which guide every phase of development, deployment, and monitoring:

• Human-centered: We design AI to enhance human expertise, not replace it. Our tools are built to support security analysts, allowing them to make faster, smarter decisions while maintaining full control over critical security operations.
• Robust: Our models undergo rigorous development, stress testing, and continuous improvement, ensuring high accuracy and precision to minimize false positives and maintain resilience against real-world complexity and adversarial attacks.
• Outcome-focused: We measure success by real-world impact. Our AI is engineered to optimize prevention, accelerate detection, and neutralize threats faster, focusing on measurable cybersecurity benefits for our customers.
• Security and privacy first: Protecting customer data is paramount. Our systems are built with security and privacy embedded from the start, guided by clear usage policies and global standards. Crucially, we do not share customer data to train third-party large language models (LLMs).
• Accountable: We have established strong governance frameworks with clear roles and oversight to manage risk and review our AI systems at every stage, ensuring we take full responsibility for the technology we develop.
• Transparent: Effective security partnership requires understanding the tools you rely on. We strive to explain what our AI does and how it works, including its capabilities and, importantly, its limitations. We provide clarity around how our AI technologies are developed, including how data is utilized for training our proprietary models, and how we work with technology partners.

Sophos continues to leverage the transformative power of AI to defeat cyberattacks. By anchoring our innovation in a steadfast commitment to human oversight, robust engineering, and complete transparency, we ensure our technologies remain a trustworthy and powerful asset in the global fight against cybercrime.

This openness, through product documentation and governance practices, empowers our customers to make informed decisions and assess the suitability of our AI solutions for their unique needs.

In that spirit, we invite you to further review our AI Principles in Cybersecurity and Responsible AI FAQs web pages, both located in the Sophos Trust Center.