Irregular ones raise $80 million to protect frontier AI models

On Wednesday, the AI ​​security company announced $80 million in new funding in the round led by Sequoia Capital and Redpoint Ventures, with participation from Wiz CEO Assaf Rappaport. A source close to the contract said the round was irregular and $450 million.

“In our view, a lot of economic activity comes soon from human dialogue and AI-on-ai interaction,” co-founder Danrahab told TechCrunch.

Previously known as Pattern Lab, Irregularity is already a key player in AI assessment. The company’s work is cited in the Claude 3.7 Sonnet security rating and Openai’s O3 and O4-Mini models. More generally, the company’s framework for scoring the vulnerability detection capabilities of models (called Solve) is widely used within the industry.

Irregularity has done important work on existing risks in the model, but the company is raising funds by looking at something even more ambitious. Discover urgent risks and actions before they surface in the wild. The company has built elaborate systems in simulated environments, allowing for intensive testing before the models are released.

“There’s a complex network simulation with AI that plays the role of an attacker and a defender,” says co-founder Omer Nevo. “So when new models come out, you can see where the defense holds and where it’s not.”

Security has become a focus for the AI ​​industry as more risks emerge as the frontier models presents more risks. Openai overhauled its internal security measures this summer, looking at the potential for corporate espionage.

At the same time, AI models are increasingly adept at finding software vulnerabilities. This is a force that has serious meaning to both the attacker and the defender.

For irregular founders, it is the first of many security headaches caused by the growing capabilities of large-scale language models.

“If the goal of Frontier Rabo is to create more and more sophisticated and capable models, our goal is to secure these models,” says Rahab. “But it’s an inspiring target, so essentially there’s a lot to do in the future.”