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 findingsAI 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. The post AI Security Report 2026 appeared first on Check Point Research.