Microsoft Defender for AI Services is enabled on every Azure subscription that hosts Azure OpenAI or Azure AI Services accounts

Overview

Defender for Cloud’s AI threat protection plan detects attacks against Azure OpenAI and Azure AI Services accounts and must be enabled at the subscription level. A subscription without the plan enabled emits no AI threat alerts, regardless of how Sentinel or Defender XDR is configured downstream. This check verifies the plan is active on every subscription that hosts Azure OpenAI or Azure AI Services accounts.

When the plan is not enabled on every subscription, the SOC cannot determine whether a silent subscription is clean or simply unmonitored — there is no way to tell the difference. Threat actors who target an unmonitored AI endpoint can carry out attacks without generating a single alert. Without coverage on every subscription, the organization cannot confirm that any of its AI workloads are protected.

Source: Overview - AI threat protection

Remediation

• Enable threat protection for AI services (step-by-step)
• Overview — AI threat protection
• Defender for AI Services alert reference
• Microsoft.Security/pricings REST reference (read / set the AI plan)

Run it

The check runs as part of the whole assessment, with the ZeroTrustAssessment module installed:

Install-Module ZeroTrustAssessment -Scope CurrentUser
Connect-Maester
Invoke-Maester -Pack ZTA -SkipBuiltIn

Leave out -SkipBuiltIn to run Maester’s own checks in the same run.

About this check

Severity	High
Effort to fix	Low
Impact on users	Low
Pillar	AI
Category	AI Threat Detection
Product	Azure
Feature	Subscriptions
Area	Logging and detection
Licence	Microsoft_Defender_for_AI_Services
Tenant	Workforce

Product, feature, area and ATT&CK are Maester’s: the assessment does not record them, so Maester keeps them in the pack’s taxonomy.json.

A Microsoft check, part of the Zero Trust Assessment pack. Text from ZeroTrustAssessment 3.1.0, © Microsoft, MIT licence.