Method Security and Palantir Technologies announced the Cardinal Program, an initiative to strengthen national cyber resilience through safe, autonomous red teaming.
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Cardinal will provide select municipalities, utilities, and critical infrastructure operators with opt-in, continuous autonomous security assessments at no cost.
These institutions protect the systems and services that underpin our way of life. They now face adversaries using increasingly capable AI to find and exploit vulnerabilities at unprecedented speed and scale.
Cardinal is our effort to close that gap. The program brings autonomous cyber systems, advanced AI, and expert operators together to support the teams protecting America’s essential infrastructure.
Method’s platform and security operators will map, probe, and safely test participating organizations’ internet-facing assets to identify attack paths. Frontier and open-weight models will power the assessments, helping defenders understand how attackers armed with the same capabilities might approach their systems. Palantir Foundry, AIP, and the Ontology for Cybersecurity will provide secure infrastructure for Method to integrate and deliver findings and support collaboration. AIP enables validation of repeatable, automated assessment workflows for these high-consequence missions, while the Ontology contextualizes findings in terms of real mission impact to focus response actions.
Assessments will emulate real-world adversary behavior, within scope and rules of engagement defined by participants. Safeguards and human oversight will be enforced to prevent disruption. Security experts will review the findings and provide adversary-informed hardening guidance. National cyber resilience will require urgent collaboration across industry and government. Our goal is to deliver capabilities to defenders now, while demonstrating a model that can scale. We hope Cardinal could give government agencies a proven technical vehicle to direct these capabilities toward systems within their mandates.
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