Job ads show DeepSeek aims for an AI agent with cybersecurity capabilities

(Alex Colville – ASPI The Strategist) New job postings from DeepSeek show the Chinese AI lab plans to build an agentic model that can find vulnerabilities in code. These details, buried in a hiring round, show DeepSeek’s new strategy following the attention garnered by a US model with such capabilities, Anthropic’s Mythos. DeepSeek has listed dozens of roles as part of a June commitment to nearly double its workforce. An ASPI analysis of the postings shows the company shifting from being a research-oriented lab to a commercially oriented AI developer, with stronger international ambitions and heavier investment in frontier models. These include a planned ‘code agent’ trained by data engineers who can ‘discover attack surfaces and construct attack paths in real-world products’, according to one listing. The hiring spree comes after DeepSeek raised US$7.4 billion last month in its first funding round – prompted, according to a report from news website The Information, by a sense of shock inside the company at the April release of Mythos, which can identify cybersecurity vulnerabilities and engage in offensive cyberattacks. – Job ads show DeepSeek aims for an AI agent with cybersecurity capabilities | The Strategist