CISCO has launched Antares, a small language model (SLM) designed for identifying vulnerabilities in codebases more efficiently than existing models. Antares comes in two versions and is aimed at organizations with limited budgets, such as universities and nonprofits. It offers low-cost solutions with low false positive rates while ensuring data sovereignty, making it an alternative to more expensive, closed large language models (LLMs).
Cisco tested Antares against leading models and found it to be significantly cheaper and faster in vulnerability detection. The launch is coupled with a new benchmark for evaluating the model's effectiveness.