AI is no longer just about experimenting with tools like ChatGPT or Gemini. It has become a powerful force reshaping industries across the globe in 2026. From healthcare and finance to education and cybersecurity, artificial intelligence is transforming how businesses operate and make decisions.
However, every technological advancement comes with its challenges. As AI continues to evolve, it is also changing the nature of cyber threats. Cybercriminals are increasingly leveraging AI to launch sophisticated, convincing and large-scale attacks, making cybersecurity a growing concern in the digital age.
According to a report by Dario Amodei-led Anthropic, the company analysed 832 accounts that were banned for malicious cyber activity between March 2025 and March 2026.
The AI company highlighted three key conclusions from its analysis of malicious cyber activity.
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AI Is Making Cyberattacks More Dangerous
First, it found that threat actors are using AI in ways that make cyberattacks more dangerous, particularly during the later and more complex stages of their operations. As the report noted, "threat actors are using AI in the later, more complex stages of their cyber operations."
According to Anthropic's report, AI is no longer being used only for basic cybercrime activities such as writing malware or phishing emails. While 67.3% of the 832 banned accounts used AI for attack preparation, the company found a growing number of threat actors using AI for more advanced operations after gaining access to a system.
“We found evidence consistent with AI being used to help increase the threat level of attackers. In the first six-month period of our analysis, 33% of actors were classified by our risk-scoring system as medium risk or higher. But by the second six-month period, that share had jumped to 56%, a roughly 1.7-fold increase,” the report read.
Anthropic also observed a shift in how cybercriminals use AI. The use of AI-assisted phishing, a common method to gain initial access to systems, declined, while the use of AI for post-compromise activities increased
Cyberattacks Are Becoming More Autonomous
Second, Anthropic observed that cyberattacks are becoming increasingly automated. “Cyberattacks are becoming more autonomous, and the fact that AI can be used to chain together many parts of the attack means that the old ways of differentiating high- from low-risk actors are no longer as effective,” Anthropic said.
The company said AI can now chain together multiple stages of an attack, allowing hackers to automate tasks that previously required significant human involvement. “Now that AI can perform highly technical tasks on an actor's behalf, there's little correlation between the skill of a threat actor and how many techniques they use: the least-skilled actors in our dataset used about 16 distinct techniques on average, whereas the most skilled used about 20. Likewise, the specific platform used—Claude Code, an API, or a chat interface—also did not correlate with an actor's risk level,” the report reads.
As a result, traditional methods of assessing a hacker's threat level are becoming less reliable. Anthropic found that even less-skilled attackers can now perform sophisticated operations using AI, narrowing the gap between novice and experienced threat actors.
Existing Security Frameworks May Not Be Enough
The report also argued that current cybersecurity frameworks, including the widely used MITRE ATT&CK framework, do not fully account for AI-enabled attack techniques.
Many of the most concerning behaviours, such as AI systems making real-time decisions, coordinating multiple attack steps, and operating with little human supervision, are not yet reflected in existing threat models. Anthropic cited a state-backed cyber espionage operation (2025) in which an AI agent was used to execute commands, exploit vulnerabilities, steal credentials, and make tactical decisions with minimal human intervention.
"There is no ATT&CK ID for this type of agentic orchestration, yet these are precisely the behaviours we expect to see much more of as AI agents become more capable," the company said.
As AI continues to evolve, Anthropic's findings serve as a reminder that the same technology powering innovation is also reshaping the cyber threat landscape in ways that security experts are only beginning to understand.
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