Databricks is buying Panther, an AI-driven security operations platform, to build out its security lakehouse strategy as an alternative to old-school SIEM tools. The deal’s price isn’t public, and it still needs regulatory sign-off. Databricks argues that traditional SIEMs rack up high costs, cover only slices of data and force teams into slow, manual processes—gaps that AI-powered threats exploit. Panther brings more than 100 prebuilt integrations for cloud infrastructure, identity services, endpoints, networks and SaaS apps, plus automation that steers threat detection, alert investigation and response. It grew from Airbnb’s open-source StreamAlert project and adds detection-as-code and large-scale analytics. Databricks plans to fold Panther into Lakewatch, its security lakehouse launched in March, embedding AI agents to automate triage and recommend next steps for each alert. This marks Databricks’ third security acquisition after Antimatter and SiftD.ai. CEO Ali Ghodsi says legacy SIEM wasn’t built for AI and that adding Panther will help customers “analyse all data and automate SOC workflows.” Panther founder Jack Naglieri adds that AI-powered agents will finally let defenders match the speed of AI-driven attacks. With 70 percent of the Fortune 500 already on its platform, Databricks is positioning itself to serve cloud, SaaS and AI-focused enterprises facing escalating automated threats.