Rising From the Ashes: How Agentic AI is Unblocking Challenges in Cybersecurity
2026-06-22 • Cryptography and Security
Cryptography and Security
AI summaryⓘ
The authors explain that many security issues are hard to solve because they require a lot of human effort. They suggest that agentic AI, which can understand and work with language or code on its own, might help reduce these difficulties. By looking at 16 examples, including how supply chains are analyzed, the authors show ways this AI might make security work easier for defenders. They focus on mapping AI abilities to real security challenges.
agentic AIsecurity challengesnatural language processingcode analysissupply chain analysisdefensive approachesemergent capabilitieslabor-intensive tasks
Authors
Gabriela F. Ciocarlie, Kathrin Grosse, Somesh Jha, Daryna Oliynyk, Andrew Paverd, Christian Wressnegger
Abstract
Security remains a high-cost challenge, with many problems historically deemed inefficient to address or effectively unsolvable. A significant number of these problems stem from labor-intensive tasks that create bottlenecks in defensive approaches. Agentic AI has the potential to alleviate these bottlenecks by directly ingesting and reasoning over natural language or code, thereby expanding the scope of feasible defenses. In this paper, we map open security problems to emergent agentic AI capabilities. To illustrate this potential, we examine 16 case studies, including supply chain analysis, highlighting how agentic AI may benefit defenders.