AI and Cybersecurity – Everything You Wanted to Know, But Were Afraid to Ask

Artificial Intelligence AI and Cybersecurity – Everything You Wanted to Know, But Were Afraid to Ask From defending networks to enabling attacks, artificial intelligence is changing every aspect of cybersecurity. Here’s what dozens of experts say security leaders need to understand now. By Kevin Townsend | June 16, 2026 (9:15 AM ET) Flipboard Reddit Whatsapp Whatsapp Email To better understand the current state of artificial intelligence (AI) in cybersecurity, SecurityWeek spoke with dozens of security practitioners, researchers, vendors, analysts, and AI experts. The result is a comprehensive snapshot of how AI is being used across the security landscape today. Organized into five key topic areas, this report examines the role of AI through multiple lenses: whether it can be trusted, how organizations are using it, how it can be misused by legitimate insiders, how it is being exploited by cyber adversaries, and where the technology is likely headed next. The five topics are: Generative AI (gen-AI) Agentic AI Shadow AI Machine learning (ML) Artificial general intelligence (AGI) Taken together, these perspectives provide a practical assessment of AI’s opportunities, risks, and likely evolution in cybersecurity. Generative AI Generative AI (gen-AI) is the bedrock of contemporary AI, although it is technically and potentially born out of earlier machine learning (ML, see below). It does what it says: it generates new content (most commonly text) from an AI model (most usually a large language model or LLM). Chatbots are the users’ interface to the LLM, enabling questions (known as prompts) to be applied and responses received in natural language, and answers to be received in natural language. Chatbots are the interface, and LLMs are the reasoning engine. For most people in most direct use the two seem inseparable – just one big gen-AI application. Advertisement. Scroll to continue reading. “Gen-AI trains on massive data sets, learns statistical and relatio