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Vincent Chow

While leading US artificial intelligence developers such as Anthropic and OpenAI unveil new models with enhanced cybersecurity capabilities, China is also aggressively scaling up its own AI-driven cyber defence market.
Anthropic’s Mythos, launched in April, sparked a rapid global response due to its ability to discover and exploit cybersecurity vulnerabilities with unprecedented speed and efficiency.
“Our assessment is that China’s own Mythos will definitely emerge, though currently the overall capabilities of its cybersecurity models are far from those of Mythos,” said Austin Zhao, senior research manager at IDC China. “But the overall trend is inevitable because the capabilities of China’s models are also rapidly increasing.”
IDC projected that China’s AI cybersecurity industry would be valued at 59.35 billion yuan (US$8.7 billion) by 2030, a more than 37-fold increase from 1.58 billion yuan in 2025.
The growth would be driven by domestic cybersecurity vendors’ adoption of AI in their product offerings, which was already having a “significant impact” on the industry, Zhao said.
“Almost every vendor is already trying to use AI, with some achieving good results in certain applications such as security operations, data security, threat detection and intelligence interpretation,” he said.

Foundational AI models carry major implications for cybersecurity because of their powerful “dual use” coding capabilities, meaning they can both discover and exploit vulnerabilities in software systems.
On Thursday, engineers at Mozilla detailed how Mythos helped them fix 423 security bugs in their flagship Firefox web browser last month, a sharp increase from an average of just dozens each month previously.
Such unprecedented capabilities have raised concerns that traditional cybersecurity vendors could be replaced by AI model companies. However, Chinese cybersecurity vendors had a strong track record of integrating AI advances to boost their offerings, Zhao said.
“Back in 2010, when AI-powered cybersecurity was just emerging and gaining popularity, several Chinese vendors invested heavily early on and were therefore incredibly quick to adapt,” he said.
However, there is uncertainty over whether Chinese vendors can keep pace with their US counterparts. While AI was shifting the global balance between cyber attackers and defenders, China was in a disadvantaged position by being shut out from the latest US tech advances, Zhao said, with Anthropic not allowing Chinese vendors to use Mythos to patch vulnerabilities.
Anthropic rival OpenAI has also taken a hawkish stance, announcing on Thursday that its latest GPT-5.5 model with enhanced cybersecurity capabilities would initially be released only to leading US cybersecurity vendors including Cisco, CrowdStrike and Cloudflare.
“How Chinese vendors can break through this predicament has become the most pressing issue,” Zhao said. He added that the gap in high-stakes areas such as “zero-day” vulnerability discovery – where cyber defenders have “zero days” to fix problems before they are exploited – could widen between the US and China in the short term.
“China will have to pool its collective strength as going it alone will be insufficient to address such industry changes,” Zhao said. “Cybersecurity vendors will need to proactively collaborate with AI companies and industry associations.”
Meanwhile, the market for AI security products was set to surge in China, with a compound annual growth rate of 50.5 per cent over the next five years, according to IDC.
While AI-powered cybersecurity products use AI to discover and patch vulnerabilities, AI security products are designed to protect AI systems themselves.
This newer sector, which includes tools such as AI model security assessments and agentic AI risk detection, has grown in importance as AI systems with high levels of autonomy proliferate, raising the risk that vulnerabilities could cause significant economic losses.
Concerns over agentic AI have become a priority for regulators in recent months, said Barbara Li, a Shanghai-based partner at Reed Smith who specialises in cybersecurity, with different regulators drafting guidance on how companies should deploy AI agents safely.

IDC forecasts that China’s AI security market would reach 34.03 billion yuan by 2030, a more than seven times increase from 4.41 billion yuan last year. “We’re seeing several areas of high market interest, including the evaluation of the security of the code generated by AI agents,” said Zhao.
Given high uncertainty about the future of AI and its fast-changing nature, Beijing has sought to promote dynamic governance through close collaboration between industry and the authorities, in a model some experts have called “cooperative governance”.
On Friday, three of China’s leading regulatory bodies – the Cyberspace Administration of China, National Development and Reform Commission, and Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) – jointly released the country’s first major policy framework specifically covering AI agents, which emphasised the importance of developing “security technologies” such as cryptographic safeguards and cyberattack detection.
This came a day after the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology, a research body under MIIT, announced a new alliance between big tech firms, including Huawei Technologies and Tencent Holdings, and institutions such as the Chinese University of Hong Kong, to promote open-source standards to better verify and audit the behaviour of AI agents.


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IDC projects that China’s AI cybersecurity industry will be valued at US$8.7 billion by 2030, a more than 37-fold increase from 2025


IDC projects that China’s AI cybersecurity industry will be valued at US$8.7 billion by 2030, a more than 37-fold increase from 2025.


China scrambles to close AI security gap as Anthropic, OpenAI pull ahead with new models

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}IDC projects that China’s AI cybersecurity industry will be valued at US$8.7 billion by 2030, a more than 37-fold increase from 2025

IDC projects that China’s AI cybersecurity industry will be valued at US$8.7 billion by 2030, a more than 37-fold increase from 2025