Botnets, adversarial attacks and data poisoning top leaders’ AI threat list
Companies are putting more money into AI while naming attacks on AI systems as the threat they are least ready to face. PwC surveyed 3,934 business and technology leaders in 71 countries between May and July 2026. Half of the security and technology executives among them ranked such attacks in their top five preparedness gaps, ahead of every other threat on the list.
More than half of the leaders asked about AI-enabled attacks put three in their top five: botnets that AI directs at scale, adversarial attacks that subtly alter what an AI system sees to make it answer wrongly, and data poisoning, which slips misleading records into the data a model learns from. PwC’s assessment is that frontier AI models can now find unknown software flaws and exploit them with minimal human involvement.
Budgets are rising, backup plans are not
Of the security and finance leaders surveyed, 84 percent expect cyber budgets to grow, and AI is among the top priorities for the money. But only 39 percent of leaders asked have fully formalized continuity plans for cyber incidents, meaning documented ways to keep critical operations running or restore them after an attack. Nearly a quarter are not developing formal plans at all. PwC itself describes cyber incidents as a matter of when, not if.
The data under AI is thin
The average company has put three of seven data risk measures in place across the whole organization. Only about half have implemented data classification, which is the basic step of knowing what data is sensitive. PwC’s argument is that AI is only as trustworthy as the data beneath it, so if you are rolling out AI tools this year, check what data they can reach and how well it is protected.
Few will let AI act alone
On the defense side, fewer than a quarter of leaders would let AI agents, software that takes actions on its own, contain and fix attacks without human approval. Most would limit agents to low-risk actions or keep a person in charge. More than half named reliability and maturity of the technology as a top barrier.
“To be successful in the era of AI, we need to be able to defend at machine speed,” says Matt Rowe, chief security officer at Lloyds Banking Group.
Companies also split on who owns AI risk. A third have set up dedicated AI roles such as a chief AI officer, while others assign it to the technology function or the CISO.
Agents produce probabilistic output, meaning output that is likely right but not guaranteed. PwC’s advice is that when an outcome must be correct every time, the agent’s work should pass through a control it cannot influence, such as a review, an approval workflow, or a check by another system.
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