Dragos has joined Anthropic’s Critical Infrastructure Defense Program, a partner-led effort that brings together the organizations that build, operate, and secure critical infrastructure to put frontier Claude models to work defending power grids, water systems, factories, and transportation networks.
AI now exists across the extended operational technology (xOT) landscape in a range of forms: as a tool threat actors use for attacks, as applications organizations are bringing inside their own operational environments for efficiency and cost-cutting, and as a capability for defenders. xOT carries stakes IT cybersecurity was never built for: physical consequence, equipment that runs for decades, systems that cannot simply be patched and rebooted. Publicly reported incidents this year have shown that AI-enabled attacks are no longer theoretical.
As AI or SI (super intelligence) expands opportunities and threats for operational environments, the challenges it brings shouldn’t be navigated in silos, which is exactly why we joined this program with Anthropic. Collective defense is not a new idea at Dragos. Dragos’s Neighborhood Keeper already provides shared, anonymized visibility into threats moving across the community. Dragos’s OT-CERT and Community Defense Program have spent years putting free cybersecurity resources and technology into the hands of practitioners at resource-constrained infrastructure to better defend themselves and reduce risk to their larger ecosystems. Joining Anthropic’s Critical Infrastructure Defense Program follows the same logic: critical infrastructure is defended better when the people protecting it work from shared practice and community knowledge, instead of each solving the same problem alone.
Anthropic built this program specifically for OT and critical infrastructure. That is the right focus, and it reflects a growing understanding of what defending these environments requires. Cybersecurity for operational environments must be grounded in xOT realities, rather than assumptions carried over from enterprise IT. That grounding at Dragos comes from our incident responders, intelligence teams, and product groups building solutions that meet the real-life needs of the practitioners on the front lines defending critical infrastructure.
Through the program, Dragos will work to turn what we learn into better detections, engineering guidance, and shared knowledge for the community. The results should reach past any single partner’s work so that the people who depend on critical infrastructure won’t ever have to think about how their lights stay on, whether their water is still safe, and if their transportation systems will keep working. Years of hands-on practice in these environments, applied together rather than alone, put that within reach.
