Security | Threat Detection | Cyberattacks | DevSecOps | Compliance

Although artificial intelligence (AI) seems relatively new to a lot of people, it was first officially created in 1956 and has been a large, improving branch of computer science ever since. The mass appeal of AI took off in late 2022 when OpenAI publicly released ChatGPTicial iintelligence (AI) seems relatively new to a lot of people, it was first officially created in 1956 and has been a large, improving branch of computer science ever since.

Researchers at LayerX warn that custom fonts can fool AI web assistants into thinking phishing pages are benign, while the human user sees something completely different. “There is a structural disconnect between what an AI assistant analyzes in a page’s HTML and what a user sees rendered by the browser,” the researchers explain.

Every year, security and tech leaders come to the RSA conference in San Francisco to take the industry’s pulse, and every RSAC tends to be dominated by a single, overarching theme. Last year, the theme was: “AI agents are coming, and governance isn’t ready.” And sure enough, the theme of RSAC 2026 was: “AI agents are here, and governance needs to catch up.”

RSA Conference 2026 made one thing clear very quickly. Security leaders are done with generic AI pitches. After two years of relentless “AI everything,” the market is now pushing back. There is a growing fatigue with vague promises, surface-level features, and what many are calling outright AI washing. The result is a trust gap. What cut through this year was not another AI-powered detection claim. It was a much more grounded question.

A finance employee receives an email that appears to come from the CFO requesting urgent payment approval. The message references a current project, uses the correct tone, and arrives at a plausible time. However, the email wasn’t written by a colleague — it was generated by AI. And it contains a malicious link. These attacks are becoming more common as threat actors use AI to produce convincing phishing emails, automate impersonation attempts, and launch social engineering campaigns at scale.

AI is moving fast. But the transition from GenAI tools that respond to prompts to AI agents that execute workflows represents something qualitatively different for security leaders. The shift goes beyond just scale, and is a fundamental change in how data moves, who touches it, and what decisions get made, often without human review.