Frontier AI's Impact on the Cybersecurity Landscape

Understand

The impact of frontier AI (i.e., AI agents and foundation models) in cybersecurity is rapidly increasing.

• In this paper, we comprehensively analyze this trend through multiple aspects: quantitative benchmarks, qualitative literature review, empirical evaluation, and expert survey.
• Our analyses consistently show that AI's capabilities and applications in attacks have exceeded those on the defensive side.
• Our empirical evaluation of widely used agent systems on cybersecurity benchmarks highlights that current AI agents struggle with flexible workflow planning and using domain-specific tools for complex security analysis -- capabilities particularly critical for defensive applications.