New York, Jan 30, 2026, 14:19 (EST) — Regular session
- CSCO slipped about 1.1% earlier but pared losses to trade down 0.2% in early afternoon action
- Rate jitters resurfaced following a hotter-than-expected U.S. wholesale inflation report and news of a new Fed chair nominee
- In the last 24 hours, Cisco unveiled new AI-driven security tools and released updated threat research
Cisco Systems shares slipped 0.2% to $78.31 in early afternoon trading Friday, after dropping as much as 1.1% earlier. Arista Networks declined 2.5%, while Palo Alto Networks edged up 0.8%.
Wall Street pulled back cautiously after Donald Trump nominated Kevin Warsh to head the Federal Reserve once Jerome Powell’s term expires, combined with hotter-than-expected producer-price data. “It’s hard to know exactly what direction Warsh will go because he’s had a past history of being a hawk,” Eric Gerster of AlphaCore Wealth Advisory told Reuters. 1
Days like this still hold weight for Cisco. As a bellwether for corporate network and security budgets, its stock often reacts sharply, even if the headlines focus mainly on products and roadmaps. Big tech names tend to catch the brunt when rates fluctuate.
Cisco’s recent news has focused heavily on security and “AI-native” tools—areas investors are watching closely as companies look to protect new AI workloads without boosting staff numbers. The real test isn’t the demos, but whether these efforts translate into higher renewal rates, software attach, and backlog growth.
On Thursday, Cisco’s Foundation AI team unveiled a new “open-weight” security reasoning model, making the underlying weights downloadable and runnable rather than restricted to a closed API. Yaron Singer described the model as “purpose-built for cybersecurity workflows.” Cisco confirmed the model is now available on Hugging Face. 2
An industry report on Friday revealed Cisco is integrating the model with “agentic AI” — software built to perform multi-step tasks instead of just responding to prompts — to accelerate investigations within security operations centers, or SOCs. The fine-tuned release is based on Meta Platforms’s Llama model, the report added. 3
Cisco’s threat intelligence division backed up its broader claims with specific data. In a blog post released Thursday, Cisco Talos reported that nearly 40% of its incident-response cases in the fourth quarter involved exploitation of public-facing applications. Phishing ranked second, the post noted, while warning that attackers wasted no time acting on newly disclosed vulnerabilities. 4
Cisco is ramping up its policy management tools. According to a Network World report Thursday, the company plans to roll out its Mesh Policy Engine next month within Security Cloud Control. This aims to let customers define security intent once, then push policies across Cisco and third-party firewalls, including Palo Alto and others. “The traditional approach … places a lot of overhead on the network operator,” Murali Rathinasamy wrote in a Cisco blog cited by the story.
The stock barely moved. That could mean the market had already factored in steady execution, or investors might be holding out for clear evidence that the security and AI stack is driving billings—not just showing promise in lab results.
There’s a risk angle too. Open-weight releases often draw attention to guardrails, compliance, and customer deployment practices. On top of that, the market’s been edgy over inflation and the direction of interest rates, which could ripple into enterprise IT spending.
Investors face a key date on Feb. 11, when Cisco reports its fiscal second-quarter results in the next quarterly call; that period ended Jan. 24. 5
