Foundation-Sec-8B-Reasoning: The First Open-Weight Security Reasoning Model
Cisco, Thursday, January 29th, 2026
Today marks another milestone in Cisco's commitment to advancing AI-native cybersecurity. Following the success of Foundation-sec-8B and Foundation-sec-8B-Instruct, the Foundation AI team is proud to announce the public release of Llama-3.1-FoundationAI-SecurityLLM-8B-Reasoning (Foundation-sec-8B- Reasoning), now available on Hugging Face.
Foundation-sec-8B-Reasoning is an 8-billion-parameter reasoning model purpose-built for cybersecurity workflows. It extends our Foundation-sec-8B and Foundation-sec-8B-Instruct models with structured reasoning capabilities that allow it to think through complex, multi-step security problems before presenting an answer.
Elevating Security Reasoning
Effective cybersecurity analysis requires deep, multi-layered reasoning. Analysts often need to connect signals across logs, code, configurations, and threat intelligence to identify root causes, predict attacker behavior, and recommend defensive actions.