AI has been playing an unenvious role in most stories circulating as of late. Not necessarily always the bad guy, it sometimes plays the role of the wary ally that you just want to punch in the nose.Here’s a feel-good story about an AI that actually just saved the day and didn’t get all smarmy about it while simultaneously putting a bunch of people out of work (I think). Google’s “Big Sleep” AI agent just performed what Google says is a world first: detecting an impending cyberattack and stopping it before it could take place.just in timeGoogle doesn’t say when the act happened, only that it was recent. Based on Google Threat Intelligence provided to Big Sleep, the AI agent discovered an SQLite vulnerability (CVE-2025-6965). Google calls it “a critical security flaw, and one that was known only to threat actors and was at risk of being exploited.”“Through the combination of threat intelligence and Big Sleep, Google was able to actually predict that a vulnerability was imminently going to be used and we were able to cut it off beforehand,” said Google.“We believe this is the first time an AI agent has been used to directly foil efforts to exploit a vulnerability in the wild.” Google was light on the finer details of how, exactly, Big Sleep performed its little miracle.Big Sleep isn’t brand new, but it is new. Google announced it last year, and as Google put it, “by November 2024, Big Sleep was able to find its first real-world security vulnerability, showing the immense potential of AI to plug security holes before they impact users.”That wasn’t the same as stopping an attack about to commence, though. When it comes to detecting an imminent threat and stopping it, the clock is ticking, and the task is presumably that much harder and more urgent for the AI.Nicely done. It doesn’t undo all the (often rightly deserved) bad press that AI agents have received lately, but good news is good news.The post Google’s ‘Big Sleep’ Just Became the First-Ever AI to Prevent a Cyberattack appeared first on VICE.