UK Government Rolls Out Agentic AI Defense Plan Alongside Industry Pledge

The UK government announced Cyber Shield, a national initiative to deploy agentic AI (autonomous AI systems that can take independent actions) for cybersecurity defense, working across government and private organizations. The plan aims to use AI red teams (attackers) and blue teams (defenders) to automatically find and fix vulnerabilities faster than human attackers can exploit them, since current vulnerability discovery has accelerated from weeks to minutes. However, cybersecurity experts quoted in the article argue that most organizations today are compromised by basic configuration failures and legacy infrastructure problems, not sophisticated AI-driven attacks, so focusing on these fundamentals may be more urgent.