AWS launches AI-enhanced security innovations at re:Invent 2025

By Chris Erasmus, General Manager, UAE, Rest of Middle East and North Africa at AWS

At re:Invent 2025, AWS unveiled its latest AI- and automation-enabled innovations to strengthen cloud security for customers to grow their business. Organizations are likely to increase security spending from $213 billion in 2025 to $377 billion by 2028 as they adopt generative AI. This 77% increase highlights the importance organizations place on securing their AI investments as they expand their digital footprints.

AWS uses artificial intelligence, machine learning, and automation to help you secure your environments proactively. These advancements include AI security agents, machine-learning and automation-driven threat detection, and agent-centric identity and access management. Together, they unify defense-in-depth across the application, infrastructure, network, and data layers to protect organizations from a wide spectrum of threats, vulnerabilities, and misconfigurations that could disrupt business operations.

AI security agents

AWS is embedding AI agents directly into security workflows to perform code reviews, collate incident response signals, and secure agentic access.

• AWS Security Agent is a frontier agent that proactively secures applications throughout the development lifecycle. It conducts automated security reviews tailored to organizational requirements and delivers context-aware penetration testing on demand. By continuously validating security from design to deployment, it helps prevent vulnerabilities early in development.
• AWS Security Incident Response delivers agentic AI-powered investigation capabilities designed to help enhance and accelerate security event response and recovery.
• AgentCore Identity now offers authentication that provides enhanced access controls for AI agents, which restricts their interactions to authorized services and data based on specific user permissions and attributes. Enabling granular boundaries for how AI agents interact with enterprise applications reduces the risk of unauthorized access or data exposure.

ML and automation-driven threat detection:

Machine learning models and automation now accelerate threat detection across more AWS environments, surfacing otherwise hard to see correlations, such as for sophisticated multistage attacks, at scale. These latest advancements save time by automatically correlating signals into consolidated sequences.

• GuardDuty extended threat detection for EC2 and ECS uses advanced AI and ML algorithms to identify sophisticated, multi-stage attacks targeting AWS accounts, workloads, and data in virtual machine, container, and serverless workloads.
• GuardDuty malware protection for AWS Backup automatically scans EC2, EBS, and S3 backups for malware. It helps you identify your last known clean backup to minimize business disruption during recovery and supports incremental scanning of net new data in between backups.
• Security Hub with near real-time analytics provides near real-time risk analytics from correlating security signals in Amazon GuardDuty, Amazon Inspector, AWS Security Hub CSPM, and Amazon Macie to unify cloud security operations.

Agent-centric identity and access management:

Intelligent access controls are redefining how organizations manage identities and permissions. These controls automate policy generation and improve your zero trust maturity level, making it easier for you to use AWS services.

• IAM policy autopilot helps AI coding assistants quickly create baseline IAM policies that teams can refine as the application evolves, so organizations can build faster.
• Outbound identity Federation helps IAM customers to securely federate their AWS identities to external services, making it easy to authenticate AWS workloads with cloud providers, SaaS platforms, and self-hosted applications.
• Private access sign-in routes 100% of console traffic through VPC endpoints instead of public internet, using intelligent routing to maintain security without compromising performance.
• Login for AWS local development lets developers use their existing console credentials to programmatically access AWS.

Transforming security through AI:

These AI and ML advancements transform security from reactive manual processes to proactive, scalable protection. You can use them to operationalize threat hunting and advance your security posture, even as you grow your digital real estate.

The confidence organizations place in cloud-native security validates this approach. The AWS-sponsored report of 2,800 IT and security decision makers and practitioners revealed that 81% agree that their primary cloud provider’s native security and compliance capabilities exceed what their team could deliver independently. Additionally, 56% responded that the public cloud was better positioned to deliver security as opposed to 37% that selected on-premises, and 51% believe the public cloud is better positioned to meet regulations versus 41% that responded on-premises.

Cloud is the foundation on which customers build their businesses, and AWS continues to deliver security innovations that reinforce that foundation.