Palo Alto Networks, a global leader in cybersecurity, has announced its report “6 Predictions for the AI Economy: The New Cybersecurity Rules of 2026”, forecasting a decisive shift toward a fully AI-based economy. In this new environment, AI will drive productivity and business processes, but it will also bring about a radical change in risks. By 2026, autonomous AI agents are expected to radically transform corporate operations, paving the way for major advancements in identity management, Security Operations Centers (SOCs), quantum computing, data security, and browser protection.
The company had previously designated 2025 as The Year of Disruption, anticipating a surge in massive breaches capable of paralyzing entire networks, driven by supply chain weaknesses and attackers with increasingly advanced and rapid capabilities. This forecast has been confirmed: 84% of serious incidents investigated this year by Unit 42® have caused operational shutdowns, financial losses, or reputational damage to companies.
For 2026, Palo Alto Networks predicts the beginning of The Year of the Defender, a new phase where AI-based defenses will shift the balance toward protection, enabling faster responses, reducing system complexity, and increasing detection capabilities against cyberattacks.
Palo Alto Networks’ AI and cybersecurity predictions for 2026:
- The New Era of Deception: The Threat to Identity in AI: In 2026, identity will become the main battleground as seamless, real-time AI deepfakes—such as CEO impersonations—make it indistinguishable from reality. This threat is amplified by autonomous agents and an astonishing machine-to-human identity ratio of 82 to 1, creating a true authenticity crisis where a single forged command can trigger a cascade of automated actions. As trust erodes, identity security must evolve from a reactive protection mechanism to a proactive enabler for organizations, safeguarding every human, machine, and AI agent.
- The New Internal Threat: Securing AI Agents: Corporate adoption of autonomous AI agents will finally provide the force multiplier needed to bridge the 4.8 million cybersecurity professional gap and end alert fatigue. However, this also introduces an inherent risk: the emergence of a new, powerful internal threat. These always-on, confidence-inspiring agents hold privileged access and, in practice, become the “keys to the kingdom,” making them the most valuable targets. Adversaries will shift from targeting humans to compromising these powerful agents, transforming them into “autonomous insiders.” This necessitates moving toward controlled autonomy, supported by runtime AI firewall tools that can stop machine-speed attacks and ensure AI workforce security from turning against its owners.
- The New Opportunity: Solving the Data Trust Issue: Next year’s frontier of attack will be data poisoning—silent corruption of AI training data at its source. This type of attack exploits a critical organizational silo between data science and security teams to create hidden backdoors and unreliable models, triggering a genuine “data trust crisis.” As traditional perimeters diminish in relevance, solutions must include a unified platform that closes this blind spot, using Data Security Posture Management (DSPM) and AI Security Posture Management (AI-SPM) for observability, combined with runtime agents capable of enforcing firewall-as-code to protect the entire AI data flow end-to-end.
- The New Legal Landscape: AI Risks and Executive Responsibility: The race for AI-driven advantage will confront a new legal reality wall. By 2026, the widening gap between rapid AI adoption and mature security practices (with only 6% of organizations having advanced strategies) will lead to major lawsuits holding executives personally accountable for uncontrolled AI actions. This “new deck” elevates AI from an IT issue to a critical legal liability for boards of directors. The CIO’s role will need to evolve into a strategic enabler—possibly by establishing a Chief AI Risk Officer position—using a unified platform that provides verifiable governance and facilitates secure innovation.
- The Countdown to Quantum: The Quantum Imperative: The “harvest now, decrypt later” threat—accelerated by AI—is creating a retroactive insecurity crisis, where stolen data today becomes a future risk. As the quantum computing horizon shortens from ten years to roughly three, governments will soon mandate a massive, complex migration to post-quantum cryptography (PQC). This operational challenge demands organizations move beyond simple patch updates and develop long-term cryptographic agility—the ability to adapt their cryptographic standards as a fundamental security baseline.
- The New Connection: Browser as a Modern Workspace: As the browser evolves from a tool for information synthesis to an agent platform capable of executing tasks, it is becoming the company’s new operating system. This trend creates the largest unprotected attack surface: an AI portal operating with a visibility vacuum. With a 890% increase in traffic generated by generative AI, organizations will need to adopt a unified, cloud-native security model capable of applying consistent zero-trust controls and data protection within the last possible milliseconds—inside the browser itself.
European Regulation and SME Exposure Shape the Spanish Landscape
In Spain, 2026 will be marked by a decisive regulatory leap in cybersecurity. The NIS2 Directive, which the European Union mandates transposing nationally, will introduce a stricter compliance framework for medium and large organizations. Although its transposition in Spain is still underway, it is expected soon. The regulation includes severe penalties—up to €10 million or 2% of global annual turnover, whichever is higher—and significantly elevates governance requirements: management must assume clear responsibilities, appoint cybersecurity officers, and ensure digital risk management training. Meanwhile, the financial sector already operates under the DORA Regulation, which tightens ICT risk management, incident reporting, and digital resilience testing for banks, insurers, and financial markets. Taken together, these European standards transfer cybersecurity—and by extension, responsible AI use—to a strategic and executive level, beyond purely technical concerns.
This regulatory pressure coincides with the urgent need to prepare for post-quantum cryptography (PQC). The EU has urged organizations to initiate transition plans, with a deadline of 2030 to adopt quantum-resistant algorithms like Kyber, Dilithium, or others, as current standards such as RSA and ECC will become vulnerable. Spain advances this effort through its National Quantum Technologies Strategy, with initiatives from the Bank of Spain and INCIBE promoting specialized training in post-quantum cryptography. This challenge is compounded by the structure of Spanish small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), which number 2,942,716—constituting 99.8% of the business fabric (Ministry of Industry, Commerce and Tourism). Many operate in BYOD environments, often without dedicated cybersecurity tools, and according to INCIBE, 90% of employees use personal devices to access corporate information. This makes browsers and cloud services their primary attack surface. In this context, securing browsers under Zero Trust principles will be critical for enabling AI productivity while minimizing high-impact security incidents.