NATO adds AI agents to cyber training tied to military operations

Military cyber teams are practicing more than how to use AI: they are learning to work alongside agents while coordinating cyber activity with physical military operations. NATO’s Cooperative Cyber Defence Centre of Excellence opened Crossed Swords 2026 in Tallinn, Estonia, on Monday, adding a dedicated AI-agent track to the exercise.

More than 250 people from over 40 countries are taking part, including NATO members and non-members. The execution phase runs through Friday. SecurityWeek reported that the exercise combines command-level decisions with hands-on cyber work, bringing together national cyber forces and supporting units rather than limiting the training to a single technical specialty.

Building agents and directing operations

The new track asks participants to build, deploy and assess AI agents, then operate alongside them. That puts development and evaluation in the same training program as their use. The exercise environment runs locally hosted AI and also uses OpenAI’s Daybreak cyber defense offering—the first time Daybreak has been used in Crossed Swords.

The human training has two distinct levels. Command staff practice directing offensive and defensive cyber assets. Specialists sharpen the tactical skills needed to carry out cyber work. Participants include military cyber operators, threat hunters who look for signs of intrusion, and digital forensics experts who examine digital evidence.

Those roles meet around the exercise’s central operational problem: timing. Participants practice planning cyber operations so their effects support physical military action. Crossed Swords is also linked to a special operations forces training event, making coordination with those forces part of the drill rather than a separate classroom topic.

Cyber effects must hit at the right moment to support a kinetic or special operations action – not in parallel, but in sequence, with timing measured in minutes, not hours. This year, that gets harder, because AI is now in the loop on both sides.

Jozef Kostelansky, Crossed Swords 2026 exercise director

Kostelansky described human oversight as critical even as agents enter the operational workflow. His stated goal is to train participants to use AI while retaining that oversight across missions involving several kinds of military activity. That is the exercise’s training objective, not a published finding that the agents have already improved mission performance.

Civilian infrastructure enters the planning

The military coordination is only one part of the exercise’s design. National cyber forces also work with civilian partners so that protecting critical infrastructure is built into their plans. More than 20 organizations from industry, academia and the nonprofit sector support the event, contributing expertise, systems for participants to target and specialized tools.

Supporting organizations include

• Security and technology companies Bitdefender, ESET, Elastic, Mandiant, OpenAI and Stamus Networks.
• Cybersecurity training provider TryHackMe and the International Committee of the Red Cross.

Crossed Swords began as a red-teaming workshop in 2014, focused on practicing the attacker’s role. It has since grown to include command-level training and combined cyber and physical military operations. The dedicated agent track is a new addition to that established exercise, not the beginning of its work on coordinating cyber missions.

Participation has roughly doubled since 2022, when about 120 people from 24 countries attended. Last year’s edition had 240 participants from around 40 nations. This year’s increase in attendance is smaller than that longer-term growth; the sharper change in the program is the explicit work of building, assessing and operating alongside AI agents.