# AI Security Report 2026

July 14, 2026

https://research.checkpoint.com/2026/ai-security-report-2026/

For years, the cyber security industry tracked AI as a force multiplier: something that made existing attack techniques faster, cheaper, and more accessible. That framing was accurate. But the Annual AI Security Report 2026 from Check Point Research documents a transition that goes further. AI has crossed from assistant to operator. Where it once helped attackers prepare, it now runs the operation.

## Key observed findings

- **AI has crossed from development aid to live attack operator.** It now does the hands-on work inside live intrusions, from China-nexus espionage campaigns to a criminal breach of multiple Mexican government agencies and has spread from nation states to ordinary cyber criminals.
- **AI now builds deployment-ready malware and attack suites.** Its involvement is often invisible in the finished artifact: one developer used an AI environment to produce VoidLink, an 88,000-line command-and-control offensive framework, in under a week.
- **Attackers prefer commercial models, and now abuse them by exploiting the agentic architecture, not just single prompts.** Most actors favor jailbroken mainstream models over self-hosted ones, and the durable bypass is now a planted configuration file an agent loads and trusts across sessions.
- **An AI-enabled criminal tooling market has matured.** Phishing-as-a-service kits now embed a language model with the jailbreak built in, and conversational AI voice-agent services run vishing and one-time-passcode theft at scale.
- **Virtual Identity is no longer a reliable trust anchor.** Voice, face, documents, and live video are now cheap to forge convincingly and are widely used in attacks taking multi-channel social engineering to a new level of integration.
- **AI itself is an expanding attack surface.** Models cannot always separate data from instructions and content they process might influence the model’s behavior; the surrounding stack adds ordinary software vulnerabilities and supply-chain risk, all in a rapidly evolving ecosystem where security practices not always mature.
- **Indirect prompt injection is on the rise.** Detections of longer malicious payloads increased sharply, rising roughly fivefold between March and May 2026 and approaching 1% of observed prompts in May. Longer payloads are more typical of content-borne and agentic attack paths, this pattern suggests that indirect prompt injection is becoming more operationally relevant.
- **Enterprise data leakage through GenAI is persistent and growing risk**. High-risk prompts doubled from 2% to 4% during the last year, while organizations used an average of 10 AI applications each month, many without official approval.
- **Data exposure risks are not evenly distributed across the verticals**. Sector-level analysis reveals that AI-related data exposure risks are not evenly distributed across the verticals, and correlate both with AI usage patterns and security maturity. Business Services recorded the highest rate of high-risk GenAI prompts at 5.91%, meaning nearly one in every 17 AI interactions carried a significant risk of sensitive data exposure.

To read the full findings, access the AI Security Report 2026 from Check Point Research [here.](https://engage.checkpoint.com/ai-security-report-2026)