In a significant move designed to address the growing opacity within AI-driven cybersecurity, the runtime-first cloud security platform Upwind has officially announced the general availability of Choppy AI, a new suite of capabilities that embeds transparent, natural-language intelligence directly into its Cloud Native Application Protection Platform (CNAPP). This launch aims to revolutionize how security teams explore, investigate, and manage their increasingly complex cloud environments by directly confronting the prevalent “black box” problem where AI provides answers without revealing its logic. The introduction of Choppy AI positions the technology as a solution engineered to harmonize the immense power of artificial intelligence with the non-negotiable requirements of user trust, granular control, and complete auditability in modern security operations. By allowing security professionals to interact with their infrastructure using plain English and see the exact queries and rules generated, Upwind is championing a shift toward a more collaborative and understandable application of AI in defending the cloud.
Addressing the “Black Box” Problem in AI Security
The Challenge of Opaque AI in Complex Environments
Modern cloud security is defined by a dual challenge that consistently overwhelms security teams: staggering environmental complexity and the inscrutable nature of many AI-powered tools designed to manage it. Today’s cloud infrastructures are sprawling, dynamic ecosystems characterized by vast asset inventories, intricate and often undocumented relationships between services, and a relentless influx of vulnerability alerts. This sheer scale and constant change create a level of operational noise that makes it nearly impossible for human analysts to manually identify and prioritize genuine threats. To combat this, many organizations have turned to AI security solutions. However, a significant barrier to their effectiveness has been their prevalent “black box” nature. These systems often deliver alerts and recommend actions without revealing the underlying data points or logical steps used to reach their conclusions. This lack of transparency fosters a deep-seated distrust, as security professionals are justifiably hesitant to implement automated rules or act on critical insights when they cannot fully understand, verify, or control the reasoning behind them. This ultimately limits the practical value of AI, turning a potentially powerful ally into a mysterious and untrustworthy oracle.
A “Glass Box” Approach to Augmented Intelligence
In direct contrast to the opaque systems that dominate the market, Upwind’s approach with Choppy AI is built upon a philosophy of complete transparency, creating what can be described as a “glass box” for cloud security. As articulated by company leadership, the platform is meticulously engineered to translate a user’s natural-language intent into structured, fully editable queries and rules. When a security analyst asks a question or describes a policy in plain English, Choppy AI does not simply return an answer; it constructs and prominently displays the precise logical expression it used to arrive at that result. This generated output is then made available for the security team to inspect, modify, and even reuse across the platform, ensuring that they retain full ownership and a deep understanding of how security decisions are being made. This methodology represents a significant trend in the industry, marking a shift away from purely automated, obscure AI and toward an augmented intelligence model. In this paradigm, AI serves as a powerful accelerator for human expertise—a co-pilot that enhances the capabilities of security professionals rather than attempting to replace them. By making advanced security accessible and understandable, this approach empowers teams to apply AI-generated logic with confidence in live production environments.
Core Capabilities and Strategic Vision
Integrating Natural Language Across Workflows
Choppy AI’s capabilities are deeply integrated across the Upwind platform, fundamentally enhancing three critical security workflows and making them more intuitive. The first area of transformation is in natural-language inventory exploration. Security teams can now probe their extensive and often convoluted cloud asset inventories using simple, free-text questions. For instance, an analyst can ask to see all publicly accessible databases that contain sensitive data, a query that would traditionally require mastering a complex query language. Choppy AI seamlessly converts this request into a formal, customizable expression within the platform’s native Query Builder, democratizing data exploration for team members of all experience levels. This same natural-language interface is extended to the creation of security policies. Teams can describe the logic for a desired rule in plain English, such as specifying the conditions for a critical misconfiguration or defining a complex, relationship-based attack path. The AI then translates this description into a transparent and editable rule that can be deployed to continuously monitor the environment, drastically streamlining the process of codifying security logic and reducing the manual effort needed to build intricate queries from the ground up.
Context-Aware Investigation and Foundation of Trust
The third major workflow enhanced by Choppy AI is conversational vulnerability investigation, which is facilitated by an interactive “AI Mode” within the platform’s Vulnerability module. This feature enables a dynamic, conversational process, allowing security teams to ask iterative follow-up questions to drill down into the specifics of any given vulnerability. What makes this capability particularly powerful is that the AI’s responses are grounded in the real-world context of the user’s actual environment. It considers live assets, their runtime configurations, their intricate relationships, and, most importantly, their real-time exposure to potential threats. This connection to runtime intelligence—a cornerstone of the Upwind platform—allows teams to move beyond theoretical risk scores and effectively prioritize threats that pose a genuine and immediate danger to their live operations. To further bolster the trust essential for such a tool, Upwind has implemented a system of dedicated monitoring for all Choppy AI capabilities. The company actively tracks real-world usage patterns, user prompts, and the AI’s resulting behavior, creating a continuous feedback loop to refine and improve the user experience while ensuring that the AI’s actions remain observable, predictable, and consistently aligned with the needs of security teams.
A Milestone in Transparent Cloud Defense
The launch of Choppy AI marked a strategic milestone for Upwind, building upon its recent introduction of “Inside-Out AI Security” and reinforcing its leadership in delivering AI-native cloud security solutions that prioritized user empowerment. The company, which was founded in 2022 by the successful team behind Spot.io, had rapidly established its presence in the market with significant funding from elite investors. This move was a clear reflection of its core philosophy: that the most effective security platform is one that accelerates workflows without compromising the control and confidence essential for modern cloud defense. By grounding its advanced artificial intelligence in real-time runtime intelligence and committing to a foundational principle of complete transparency, Upwind provided the industry with a platform that aimed not just to automate security tasks, but to augment the expertise of the professionals on the front lines, ensuring they always remained in command.
