Open SourceCiscoReleased 2026-07

Antares-1B

Efficient open-weight small language model for finding known vulnerabilities in codebases

Context window

Not announced

Input / 1M tokens

Free

Output / 1M tokens

Free

Provider

Cisco

Data verified 2026-07-23

Antares-1B is a specialized security small language model (SLM) designed to pinpoint where known vulnerabilities exist within codebases. Built by Cisco Foundation AI, it specializes in vulnerability localization—connecting external vulnerability knowledge to internal source code—and runs locally without requiring source code to be sent to external providers. The model significantly outperforms larger closed- and open-weight models on vulnerability detection benchmarks while running at a fraction of the cost.

Capability index

Relative estimates (0-100) to place this model against its peers, grounded in published benchmarks.

Coding
7
Reasoning
6
Math
0
Multimodal
0
Long context
5
Speed
9
Cost efficiency
10

How to access it

Download open-weight model from Hugging Face. Cisco vets access on a case-by-case basis. Models run locally on-premises.

Strengths

  • 172x cheaper than GPT-5.5 on vulnerability localization benchmark
  • 15.2x cheaper than GLM-5.2 open-weight model
  • Faster execution: 15 minutes for 500-task benchmark vs 5 hours for frontier models
  • Runs locally, maintaining data sovereignty
  • Outperforms Gemini 3 Pro on vulnerability localization
  • Specialized focus reduces false positives

Best for developers who...

Security teams with limited resourcesOrganizations requiring local code analysisContinuous vulnerability scanning with cost constraintsRepository-level vulnerability triage

When to choose it (and when not to)

Reach for Antares-1B when...

  • When cost efficiency is critical for repeated vulnerability scanning
  • When source code must remain on-premises or private
  • For initial triage phase of vulnerability investigation
  • For organizations with constrained security budgets

Look elsewhere if...

  • Antares is not a replacement for full application security stack
  • Should not replace dependency analysis, SAST, or human review
  • Not designed as a general-purpose coding assistant
  • Does not generate code or answer programming questions

How to use it

  • Provide CWE (Common Weakness Enumeration) identifiers or vulnerability descriptions
  • Use in CI/CD workflows triggered by security advisories or dependency alerts
  • Leverage ranked file list output as starting point for security analyst triage

Quickstart

Python
from transformers import AutoModelForCausalLM, AutoTokenizer
model_id = 'Cisco/antares-1b'
model = AutoModelForCausalLM.from_pretrained(model_id)
tokenizer = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained(model_id)

Access requires Hugging Face verification from Cisco. Model runs locally with standard transformer inference.

API model id: antares-1b

Benchmarks

BenchmarkScoreNotes
Vulnerability Localization Benchmark (VLoc Bench)Beats Gemini 3 Pro; matches GLM-5.2500-task dataset evaluating vulnerability localization. Antares-1B demonstrates near-frontier accuracy at fraction of cost.
Cost efficiency$0.71 per 500-task benchmark runCompared to $12.50 for GLM-5.2 and $141 for GPT-5.5
Speed15 minutes on single Nvidia H100 GPUvs 5 hours for GPT-5.5 on same 500-repository evaluation

Source: Cisco Foundation AI Official Blog

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