Amazon is leveraging AI not just to automate tasks, but to actively defend systems, with AI agents harnessed to simulate both attackers and defenders. Defensive agents train protocols for proactive threat detection, generate digital signatures and respond in minutes — far faster than traditional methods, according to Steve Schmidt, senior vice president and chief security officer at Amazon. Amazon.com Inc. is redefining security at the intersection of AI, physical safety and public-private collaboration. Its evolving strategy blends digital resilience with real-world safeguards to counter the speed and complexity of today’s threat landscape. “We also build tools that are defenders — their job is to identify the attacks and to extract from the attacks the signatures, which our systems can use to prevent access in the future,” he said. “What we measure now is, instead of situations where it used to take days, weeks or months to build new signatures for attacks, these agents can do it in minutes — and it’s really transformative for our ability to defend systems.” While AI unlocks accuracy and expediency, a human in the loop is still critical for validating actions before deployment. Eventually, some agents could become fully autonomous in low-risk environments, but high-stakes systems will continue to require human oversight, Schmidt added.