Cohere signs LOI to buy AI vulnerability-hunter AISLE, adding cyber to its sovereign AI stack
What's the deal? Cohere has signed a letter of intent to acquire AISLEDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, a San Francisco- and Prague-based startup that uses AI to discover and remediate previously unknown software vulnerabilities. Terms were not disclosed.
Who is AISLE? Founded in 2025 by Ondrej Vlcek, former CEO of Czech antivirus maker Avast, with co-founders from Google DeepMind and Anthropic, AISLE builds autonomous systems that combine foundation models with large-scale code analysis and automated remediation. In its first year it discovered more than 500 previously unknown vulnerabilities assigned CVEs across over 100 codebases — including all 12 vulnerabilities in OpenSSL's January security release and 18 of the 24 CVEs in curl's latest release.
Why now? The deal slots into Cohere's roughly $20 billion combination with Germany's Aleph Alpha, adding cybersecurity to the sovereign-AI stack Cohere is assembling for enterprise and government customers that need private cloud, on-premises or fully air-gapped deployments. AISLE's Prague engineering hub also deepens Cohere's European footprint, following its acquisition of Reliant AI.
What's the endgame? Cohere says combining AISLE's autonomous vulnerability research with its frontier models should make discovering, validating and fixing software vulnerabilities a continuous, scalable capability — strengthening threat detection and governance for AI agents across the combined group's enterprise and public-sector deployments.
The signal: As AI vendors compete for government and regulated-industry customers on security and data sovereignty, folding an automated vulnerability-hunting capability straight into the model stack shows cybersecurity becoming table stakes for "sovereign AI" platforms, not an add-on.
Read more: Cohere · Reuters via CNA
Image credit: Cohere
