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Why we started Data is CITY 24 hours after finishing an emergency PHP response in 30 minutes
In an era when AI speeds up attacks, how can AI agents and people protect their own systems?
When attacks can no longer be fully prevented, what you need is a map of your own systems. Even a map too complex for people to handle becomes manageable as a city.
On October 21, 2026, a fix was released for a critical vulnerability in the programming language PHP. That night, we at Teleport finished our own response, together with AI agents, in about 30 minutes.
Within the next 24 hours, we launched a project called “Data is CITY.” In an age when AI-driven cyberattacks keep growing, how do we protect our own systems together with AI agents? I want to set down why we started this project.
01When attacks can’t all be stopped, the first thing you need is a “map”
AI keeps advancing. Hackers use AI too, making their attacks faster and faster. What should we, the defenders, do?
In security today, it is considered almost impossible to fully prevent attacks and intrusions. That is exactly why we have long believed that what matters is a “map” for understanding what is happening in our own systems right now.
But grasping a company’s complex, sprawling internal services through dashboards alone is impossible. It exceeds what a person can handle at once.
02A simulation game can handle this complexity
So what do we do? What came to mind were city-building simulation games like SimCity and Cities: Skylines. In those games, players run the roads, the power, the water and the crowds of people who live there, all while looking at them as the shape of a city. If that works, couldn’t we handle a company’s complex systems the same way?
So we built our own infrastructure and data platform as a city in a 3D space we call “CITY.” Inside the CITY, AI agents gather security information from inside and outside the company 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. We humans decide each day’s response while the agents explain things to us.
Treating our data platform as a city, AI agents and humans join hands to take on cybersecurity. That is how “Data is CITY” began.
03The PHP turmoil is only a prelude. That’s why we want to share what we learn
I think this PHP turmoil is only a prelude to the fight against cyberattacks that is about to begin in earnest.
That’s why we want to share what we’ve learned widely, rather than keeping it to ourselves. CITY is a “city,” after all; it isn’t meant to be closed off inside one company. We want everyone to bring what they know so we can get through the hard stretches of cyberattacks together.
We talked about all this with our team while soaking in a hot spring in Atami. Twenty-four hours after the PHP turmoil, Data is CITY was up and running.
About this article
A first-person account by Gaku Noguchi, co-founder of Teleport. “About 30 minutes” is based on Teleport’s internal records and has not been verified by a third party.
Tomoyasu Hirano and Gaku Noguchi talk in detail about why CITY was born and how we have been building out the city since August in the conversation “The “city” we built for AI agents ended up protecting our company.”
