The AI Arms Race: How Adversaries are Weaponizing AI for Speed and Scale

This report summarizes 2025–2026 threat intelligence showing that AI has not created fundamentally new attacks but has compressed attack timelines and scaled existing tactics: AI accelerates reconnaissance, social engineering, malware development, and execution (including malware querying LLMs at runtime), and enables agentic operations and large-scale fraudulent IT-worker schemes; defenders must prioritize speed of operationalization, relevant prioritization, and visibility of new signals to close the gap between knowing and acting.