Cybersecurity entering AI-vs-AI era as attackers, defenders deploy autonomous systems: WEF report
Cybersecurity entering AI-vs-AI era as attackers, defenders deploy autonomous systems: WEF report
Publish Date: 2026-05-09 05:54:00
Source Domain: m.economictimes.com
Cybersecurity is entering an “AI versus AI” era, with companies increasingly deploying autonomous artificial intelligence systems to investigate, detect and respond to cyberattacks at machine speed as hackers themselves rapidly adopt AI-driven attack methods, according to a new World Economic Forum (WEF) white paper released in collaboration with KPMG.
The report, titled “Empowering Defenders: AI for Cybersecurity”, said attackers are increasingly using AI “to increase the speed, scale and sophistication of threats”, forcing cybersecurity systems to evolve beyond traditional human-led defences.
“Adversaries are increasingly operating at machine speed, using AI to conduct reconnaissance of targets and vulnerabilities, generate malware, exploit code, evade detection and launch attacks at scale,” the report said.
The WEF report noted that what earlier required “weeks of effort can now be executed in minutes”, lowering technical barriers for cybercriminals and significantly increasing the scale of attacks.
To counter this shift, organisations are increasingly deploying AI-driven systems capable of autonomously analysing threats, investigating suspicious activity and recommending or triggering response actions in real time.
Highlighting real-world deployments, the report cited IBM’s “ATOM” system, which autonomously investigates, enriches and scores cybersecurity alerts using agentic AI. According to the report, the system now handles “about 95 per cent of daily investigations” while automating more than “850 analyst hours per month”.
The report also pointed to Allianz’s “hypothesis-based AI analysis system”, which dynamically retrieves and analyses forensic data during investigations instead of collecting all endpoint data centrally. The system was developed to address the growing challenge of analysing massive volumes of cybersecurity data generated across enterprise systems.
Meanwhile, Google has deployed AI agents such as “Big Sleep” and “CodeMender” to identify…
