Announcing IBM Concert Secure Coder: Bringing security to the moment code is written

AI is accelerating software development and, at the same time, reshaping the scale and speed of security risk. As organizations generate more code and adopt AI-driven tools, the number of potential vulnerabilities is increasing faster than traditional processes can manage. This shift is forcing enterprises to rethink how they approach security across the software development lifecycle. This isn’t a cold start. Leading organizations—including IBM—have been tracking these trends and investing in automation, AI-driven remediation and developer-first security practices to stay ahead.

At Think 2026, IBM introduced the new Concert platform that is designed for managing IT Operations in the agentic era. Concert Protect is part of that new platform and helps organizations move from fragmented security practices to continuous exposure management. Building on this foundation, the introduction of IBM Concert Secure Coder extends these capabilities directly into the developer experience, enabling teams to address risk earlier and more effectively.

Developers no longer wait for pull requests, pipeline scans or production incidents. They see risks and fixes in real time, inside their Integrated Development Environment (IDE).

Security is entering a new phase.

AI can now surface potential vulnerabilities across vast, complex technology estates at a pace that challenges traditional triage and remediation approaches.

This is not a failure of security teams, but a reflection of how quickly the landscape is evolving. It’s a sign that traditional approaches were never designed for AI-scale discovery. The challenge enterprises face today is not visibility. It’s action: deciding what matters, coordinating response and reducing exposure before risk becomes impact.

In April 2026, a notable signal of how quickly discovery capabilities are advancing emerged. Anthropic’s Mythos model reportedly surfaced thousands of previously unknown vulnerabilities across major operating systems and browsers, yet fewer than 1% had been patched.

Some described it as a “cybersecurity reckoning,” while others pointed to the growing gap between discovery and response.

But discovery alone isn’t the challenge. Acting on it effectively at scale is what matters most. The real challenge is figuring out which vulnerabilities actually matter and fixing them before they cause problems for the business.

For most enterprises today, the problem is no longer finding vulnerabilities; it’s deciding which ones actually matter and fixing them before they disrupt the business. 

AI is significantly accelerating the vulnerability landscape: more code is being written faster than ever, more vulnerabilities are being discovered automatically and both are increasingly happening at machine speed. But remediation still moves at human speed. Most organizations are already juggling tens of thousands of exposures across siloed tools and teams, relying on manual triage, disconnected workflows and static risk scores.

The result is predictable: slow remediation, missed high-impact risks, growing technical debt and avoidable outages. Now add AI-driven discovery into that environment. The problem isn’t that these tools find vulnerabilities; it’s that they overwhelm systems that weren’t built to act on them. IBM looks at it this way: AI can dramatically increase the volume of vulnerabilities surfaced. Concert helps organizations manage that scale with clarity, prioritization and automated action.

To operate in this new reality, enterprises need more than scanners. They need a continuous exposure management system.  One that connects discovery, prioritization, and remediation into a governed, automated loop. That’s exactly what IBM Concert Protect was designed to deliver. Instead of treating security as a late-stage checkpoint, Concert Protect makes it a continuous capability across the entire software development lifecycle, from code to runtime.

At its core is a simple but powerful loop:

1. Detect: Continuously discover exposures across source code, open-source dependencies, containers and images, and infrastructure and runtime environments.
2. Assess: Apply AI-driven, business-aware risk scoring based on exploitability and real-world threat activity, environmental context (criticality, exposure, data sensitivity), not just static severity scores. This ensures teams focus on what truly threatens operations, not just what generates alerts.
3. Remediate: Turn insight into action through automated workflows, integration with tools teams already use (Jira, ServiceNow, GitHub, and more) and human-in-the-loop governance.
4. Learn: Continuously improve prioritization and automation with every release.

With IBM Concert Secure Coder, IBM extends continuous exposure management directly into the developer workflow. Secure Coder brings detection, prioritization and remediation to the moment code is written, not days or weeks later.

Developers no longer wait for pull requests, pipeline scans or production incidents. They see risks and fixes in real time, inside their IDE. This enables team to:

1. Detect early: Identify vulnerabilities, secrets, misconfigurations, and open-source risks as code is written.
2. Fix immediately: AI-powered recommendations provide context-aware fixes with explainability and governance built in.
3. Prioritize what matters: Findings are ranked by business impact, not just technical severity.
4. Stay connected: All findings flow back into Concert, giving security and operations teams a unified, end-to-end view of exposure across the estate.

Secure Coder isn’t just a developer tool. It serves as the final link in a continuous exposure management lifecycle, where risks are detected directly in code as developers work, then correlated and prioritized across the broader environment with Concert. From there, remediation is automated across pipelines and infrastructure, and over time, organizations can measure outcomes and continuously improve their security posture.

• The outcome is a meaningful shift: Fewer late-stage surprises
• Less rework and technical debt
• Faster, safer releases
• Measurable improvement in resilience

AI-powered tools like Mythos represent a significant step forward in finding vulnerabilities. But discovery is only the first step. These tools can generate massive volumes of findings and suggest potential fixes, but they can’t validate, prioritize, govern and operationalize remediation at enterprise scale.

IBM Concert Protect operates above that layer. It ingests findings from any discovery source, AI-driven or traditional, and converts them into prioritized, governed, automated action. That’s the difference between: knowing you have a vulnerability problem and actually fixing it at scale.

Some of the more extreme narratives miss the point: the real challenge isn’t that AI can find more vulnerabilities, but that many organizations are still evolving how they act on them at scale. This shift is also a forcing function, encouraging organizations to modernize security operations, embed security earlier in development and adopt more automated, outcome-driven approaches.

IBM Concert Protect changes that. By connecting detection, assessment and remediation across the SDLC, and now starting at the very first line of code, Concert turns vulnerability overload into operational clarity and automated action.

In the age of AI-driven threats, discovery is just the beginning. Building resilience through automation, prioritization and developer-integrated security is what comes next.

Explore IBM Concert Secure Coder