Security teams triaging a known weakness class
Narrow a repository to likely files after mapping an advisory, CVE, or GHSA to an applicable CWE.
Independent tool overview
Antares at a glance
Cisco Antares is a family of compact, open-weight security models built to explore a source repository and rank the files most likely to contain a known class of vulnerability.
Visit the official Antares site ↗
- Product type
- Open-weight models for agentic vulnerability localization
- Developer
- Cisco Foundation AI
- Public models
- Antares-350M and Antares-1B
- Primary input
- CWE description plus read-only repository access
- Primary output
- Candidate vulnerable files and an exploration trace
- License
- Apache 2.0
- Deployment
- Local or self-hosted inference with a sandboxed agent loop
- Last reviewed
- August 30, 2026
Overview
What Antares is
Antares is not a conventional hosted scanner or general coding assistant. Cisco Foundation AI trained the models for a narrow task: given a CWE and a repository snapshot, use terminal-style exploration to identify likely vulnerable files. The publicly released Antares-350M and Antares-1B weights can run in an organization's own environment, while Cisco's CLI packages the agent loop and can emit human-readable, JSON, Markdown, and SARIF results.
The narrow specialization and local deployment are the attraction, but the output is only a triage lead. Antares does not establish that a vulnerability exists, identify the exact line, explain the bug, produce a validated fix, or replace static analysis, dependency scanning, dynamic testing, threat modeling, and expert security review.
Use cases
Who Antares is best for
The strongest fit depends on the job you need the product to complete, not the size of its feature list.
Organizations keeping source code in-house
Run the weights and repository exploration in a controlled local or on-premises environment.
Researchers evaluating specialized security models
Study a compact terminal-agent workflow and compare it under Cisco's documented vulnerability-localization protocol.
CI teams adding an assistive triage signal
Produce reviewable file candidates or SARIF alongside established application-security checks.
Resource-conscious defensive programs
Experiment with a smaller, task-specific model without routing every investigation through a frontier hosted model.
Capabilities
Core Antares features
CWE-guided localization
Starts from a CWE identifier and generic weakness description rather than requiring a natural-language coding request.
Repository exploration
Uses terminal commands such as grep, find, and file inspection to narrow likely locations.
File-level candidates
Returns repository-relative files believed to contain the target weakness for analyst review.
Iterative search
Can revise its search path as repository evidence is added to the agent context.
Local deployment
Open weights enable inference inside a controlled environment rather than requiring source upload to a hosted AI service.
Two model sizes
Cisco publicly released a smaller 350M model and a stronger 1B-family model for different resource and quality tradeoffs.
Antares CLI
The gated model repository includes a CLI that packages the model's agent loop and connects to a configured OpenAI-compatible inference endpoint.
Plan command
Profiles the repository and previews a bounded portfolio of potentially relevant CWE checks without claiming a vulnerability was found.
Focused query
Runs one targeted CWE investigation against a repository snapshot.
Bounded sweep
Runs independent investigations across a selected set of CWEs after the operator reviews the plan.
Multiple report formats
The CLI can produce terminal output plus JSON, Markdown, and SARIF for review and pipeline integration.
No vector database required
The documented agent explores the repository directly instead of relying on an external embedding index.
Documented benchmark
Cisco publishes the VLoc Bench task definition, evaluation protocol, and file-level precision, recall, and F1 results.
Process
How the Antares workflow works
Step 1
Obtain authorized access
Accept the official Hugging Face repository conditions, review the Apache 2.0 license, and use only code you are authorized to assess.
Step 2
Isolate a repository snapshot
Mount a disposable copy read-only inside a container with networking disabled, resource limits, command timeouts, and no credentials or production secrets.
Step 3
Start with a plan
Preview a small set of repository-relevant CWEs and treat selection scores only as relevance rankings—not vulnerability probabilities.
Step 4
Run one focused query
Investigate a justified CWE first and record the exact repository revision, model version, inference settings, and CLI version.
Step 5
Inspect the full trace
Review every command and candidate file, then confirm the weakness by reading the relevant control flow, data flow, configuration, and tests.
Step 6
Corroborate with other controls
Compare findings with static analysis, dependency and secret scanning, dynamic tests, advisories, and qualified manual review.
Step 7
Remediate and verify separately
Develop a reviewed fix, add regression tests, rerun the security toolchain, and require human approval before merge or release.
Cost
Antares pricing and free plan
Cisco publishes Antares-350M and Antares-1B as Apache 2.0 open-weight models with no model subscription price. Organizations still pay for hardware or hosted inference, storage, engineering, sandboxing, monitoring, CI integration, and security review. The official model repositories require Hugging Face authentication, acceptance of conditions, and sharing contact information with the publisher.
Antares-350M
Open weight
The smaller public model for lower-resource experimentation and defensive localization workflows.
- Apache 2.0 license
- Official Hugging Face access conditions apply
- Lower published VLoc Bench performance than Antares-1B
- Compute and operating costs are separate
Antares-1B
Open weight
The stronger public model and the focus of Cisco's current quickstart.
- Apache 2.0 license
- Official repository contains the Antares CLI package
- Designed for a single-GPU, self-hosted workflow
- Compute and operating costs are separate
Antares-3B
Not publicly released at review
Cisco reports benchmark results for a larger family member, but its launch article and public collection list only the 350M and 1B releases.
- Do not plan production access around it until official weights and terms are published
- Published benchmark claims are provider-reported
Pricing checked . Check current pricing at the source ↗
Assessment
Antares strengths and limitations
Where it stands out
- Narrowly optimized for file-level vulnerability localization
- Can keep proprietary repositories inside a controlled environment
- Open-weight Apache 2.0 release supports inspection and self-hosting
- Compact models reduce inference requirements relative to frontier-scale systems
- Cisco provides a documented CLI and quickstart
- JSON, Markdown, and SARIF outputs support review workflows
- Search traces give analysts more context than an unexplained file list alone
- The benchmark protocol and file-level metrics are publicly documented
- Can complement deterministic security tools with repository-level search
- A focused query encourages bounded investigation rather than unstructured autonomous scanning
What to consider
- Antares localizes candidate files; it does not prove that a vulnerability exists
- It does not provide line-level localization, a reliable explanation, exploit proof, or validated remediation
- The Antares-1B model card reports a File F1 of 0.209 on its primary benchmark, so many outputs will be incomplete or incorrect
- Cisco's primary benchmark contains known-vulnerable tasks and should not be read as a clean-repository false-positive rate
- Provider benchmark comparisons are narrow and do not establish superiority across application security
- Performance degrades on repositories larger than 10 MB under the documented 15-command budget
- Multi-file vulnerabilities requiring broad context underperform
- The model struggles with weakness classes requiring deeper semantic behavior rather than distinctive searchable patterns
- Its training-data cutoff is April 10, 2025, so current advisories and techniques need external supplementation
- Results can vary across runs because generation is sampled
- Language and vulnerability coverage may reflect biases in the training and benchmark data
- The model is not designed for general-purpose coding, chat, compliance conclusions, or autonomous remediation
- Cisco says no standalone conversational safety alignment was added; safeguards must be implemented around the agent
- Repository content can be adversarial, so terminal access must remain sandboxed, read-only, time-limited, and offline
- Open weights do not provide a managed scanner, support program, vulnerability database, or production operating controls
- Official model file access is gated and requires sharing contact information with Cisco Foundation AI
- Self-hosting shifts hardware, patching, provenance, model security, audit logging, and incident-response responsibility to the operator
- Antares complements rather than replaces SAST, SCA, secret scanning, DAST, container and infrastructure checks, and threat modeling
Compare
Antares alternatives
The right alternative depends on the specific output, workflow, controls and budget your project requires.
Agents
Codex Security
A broader hosted security agent aimed at repository scanning and patch development rather than only local file-level localization.
Explore Codex Security →Coding
Claude Security
A managed repository-security workflow with scanning, patch suggestions, scheduled operation, and team-tool exports.
Explore Claude Security →Coding
DryRun Security
A pull-request-oriented application-security option for teams that want contextual findings inside the development workflow.
Explore DryRun Security →Questions
Antares FAQs
What is Cisco Antares?
Antares is a family of compact security language models from Cisco Foundation AI. It is trained to explore a repository from a CWE description and identify the source files most likely to contain that weakness.
Is Antares a vulnerability scanner?
It is better described as a model component for vulnerability localization. The CLI can run focused checks and sweeps, but the resulting files are hypotheses for analyst review, not confirmed vulnerabilities.
Which Antares models are available?
Antares-350M and Antares-1B were publicly released on Hugging Face when reviewed. Cisco discusses Antares-3B and publishes benchmark results for it, but the public collection did not list released 3B weights.
Is Antares free?
The public weights use the Apache 2.0 license and do not have a model subscription price. You still bear inference, hardware, storage, engineering, sandbox, monitoring, and security-review costs.
Can Antares run locally?
Yes. Local or on-premises deployment is a central use case. Cisco recommends an isolated container with networking disabled, command timeouts, resource limits, access controls, and human oversight.
Does Antares fix vulnerabilities?
No. Its intended output is a set of likely affected files. It does not provide a validated patch, and Cisco explicitly places autonomous remediation outside the intended use.
How accurate is Antares-1B?
Cisco's model card reports 0.209 File F1 on VLoc Bench under its documented protocol. That is a useful research result for a compact model, but it also means outputs require substantial verification and should not be described as an accuracy percentage.
Can Antares replace static analysis?
No. Cisco positions it as a complement to the broader application-security stack, including static and dynamic analysis, dependency and secret scanning, container and infrastructure checks, and expert review.
Is it safe to give Antares terminal access?
Only inside a tightly isolated, disposable, read-only environment. Disable networking, remove secrets and credentials, restrict commands and resources, log the trajectory, and never allow model output to trigger remediation or deployment without review.
Bottom line
Our Antares verdict
Antares is an interesting open-weight building block for teams that need private, low-cost, CWE-guided repository triage. Its value is narrowing an investigation inside a controlled environment; it should never be presented as a complete scanner, a confirmed finding, or an autonomous security authority.
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