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The New Arms Race: Writing SLAs for Autonomous Combat

 

The New Arms Race: Writing SLAs for Autonomous Combat

For years, SLAs gave us clean metrics, Mean Time to Detect (MTTD), Mean Time to Respond (MTTR), time-to-resolution. These numbers looked great in board meetings and satisfied compliance checkboxes.

But in 2025, they’re mostly fiction.

Take MTTR. We used to measure how long a human analyst needed to investigate and contain a breach. But AI doesn’t operate on human time. A generative AI system can scan for vulnerabilities, exploit one, pivot across endpoints, and exfiltrate terabytes of data, in under a minute.

By the time you're even aware of the breach, your SLA clock is already irrelevant.

Detection Is Broken, Too

Static, rule-based detection systems weren’t built for polymorphic malware or deepfake-powered phishing campaigns. Today’s AI-generated threats evolve in real time, mimic legitimate behavior, and bypass traditional filters without resistance.

Alert fatigue? It’s become full-scale operational failure. Human analysts can't triage thousands of daily alerts, especially when many are triggered by AI-crafted decoys designed to overwhelm and distract.

The threat landscape has changed. Our contracts haven’t.

What Modern SLAs Must Actually Measure

It’s time to throw out outdated metrics and rewrite the rulebook. Here’s how:

1. Engineer SLAs for an Autonomous Defense Era

Measure what matters in an AI-driven battlefield. Think:

  • Mean Time to AI Model Adaptation
  • AI-Assisted Remediation Success Rate
  • Autonomous Containment Response Time

These show whether your defenses are evolving faster than the attackers, not how fast a human reacts after the damage is done.

2. Predictive, Not Reactive

The best defense is knowing what’s coming. SLAs should now include:

  • Behavioral anomaly prediction rates
  • Pre-attack threat signature detection
  • False positive suppression accuracy

If your SLA doesn’t measure foresight, it’s already falling behind.

3. Response and Recovery Must Be Autonomous

Human-led response? That’s a postmortem, not a defense. SLAs must prioritize:

  • Automated containment scope and speed
  • Self-healing system success rates
  • AI-led data restoration validation

In healthcare especially, response speed isn’t just about uptime, it’s about patient safety.

4. Outcomes Over Alerts

Don’t count how many alerts you saw or how quickly they were closed. Focus on what actually matters:

  • Reduction in successful AI-driven phishing
  • Uptime continuity during live threat events
  • Sustained integrity of sensitive data under attack

This isn’t box-checking, it’s real-world damage prevention.

5. Transparency Is Non-Negotiable

Black-box AI tools introduce unacceptable risk. Modern SLAs must demand:

  • Explainability metrics (decision traceability)
  • Auditability guarantees
  • Regulatory transparency thresholds (HIPAA, PCI, etc.)

If your AI can’t explain its decisions—or its silence—it has no business in critical infrastructure.

6. SLAs Must Be Living Documents

The AI threat landscape mutates weekly. Your SLAs must evolve just as fast. That means:

  • Quarterly reassessments
  • Threat intelligence synchronization
  • Continuous feedback from real-world telemetry

If your SLA hasn’t changed in six months, it’s not just outdated, it’s a liability.

Time’s Up for Old Thinking

This isn’t about adding an “AI clause” to an old framework. It’s about admitting we’re playing a new game, with new physics, new adversaries, and far higher stakes.

Legacy SLAs offer the illusion of control in a world where control must be redefined, programmatically, probabilistically, and in real time.

Cybersecurity leaders must stop measuring how fast humans react and start measuring how effectively machines defend. Because in an AI-powered battlefield, slow equals breached.

Brian Wilson is a cybersecurity strategist and founder of GT1, a consultancy focused on adapting digital defense frameworks for the AI era. He advises healthcare and enterprise organizations on reengineering their security infrastructure for speed, autonomy, and resilience.



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