In 2026, the mass personalization of cyberattacks will disrupt the classical kill chain model, which relies on observing and then reacting to stop threats. Attackers will leverage AI to understand business's unique vulnerabilities and craft personalized, novel software for each enterprise. This means every organization will see a massive rise in sophisticated, tailored attacks that are not known to the majority of their current security tools, pitting them in a race against time to spot the attack and respond before sustaining widespread damage.
US-based Anthropic, said its coding tool, Claude Code, was manipulated by a Chinese state-sponsored group to attack 30 different entities around the world in September, achieving a handful of successful intrusions. This was a significant escalation from previous AI-enabled attacks it monitored, it wrote in a blog post on Thursday, because Claude acted largely independently: 80 to 90% of the operations involved in the attack were performed without a human in the loop.