AI agents are quite popular among the developer community at the moment, but they haven’t yet been deployed in the real world at scale. But one of the world’s largest tech companies has said that its AI agent has helped it prevent a cybersecurity incident.
Google CEO Sundar Pichai has said that the company’s cybersecurity AI agent — named ‘Big Sleep’ — has helped it prevent a security incident. He said that this was likely the first time an AI agent had done something like this.
“New from our security teams: Our AI agent Big Sleep helped us detect and foil an imminent exploit,” Pichai wrote on X. “We believe this is a first for an AI agent – definitely not the last – giving cybersecurity defenders new tools to stop threats before they’re widespread,” he added.
Last year, Google had announced Big Sleep, an AI agent developed by Google DeepMind and Google Project Zero, that actively searched and found unknown security vulnerabilities in software. The company says that recently, based on intel from Google Threat Intelligence, the Big Sleep agent discovered an SQLite vulnerability (CVE-2025-6965). It was a critical security flaw, and one that was known only to threat actors and was at risk of being exploited. Through the combination of threat intelligence and Big Sleep, Google says it was able to actually predict that a vulnerability was imminently going to be used, and was able to cut it off beforehand.
AI agents should be a natural fit for cybersecurity. AI systems can already understand and write code better than most humans. If there were agents that actively keep looking for security bugs in software in the background, it’s quite likely that if they try for long enough, they will be able to surface bugs and vulnerabilities. Unlike human hackers, these AI agents can read and ingest massive amounts of code at once, and can also work 24*7 without breaks.
Google not only seems to have deployed such an agent in ‘Big Think’, but it’s already found a critical security vulnerability and helped mitigate it. There had been concerns around how AI could be misused to hack into computer systems and find vulnerabilities. And while these risks persist, Google has shown that AI can also help in find these vulnerabilities — and fix them before they’re exploited.