Cybersecurity Predictions for 2026: When Bots, Agents, and Humans Collide

For most of the past decade, cybersecurity predictions have followed a familiar script. More ransomware. More phishing. More AI on both sides of the fight. But as 2026 approaches, a quieter shift is underway, one that forces organizations to rethink not just threats, but who and what is actually showing up on their digital front doors.

The next wave of disruption is not only about attackers getting smarter. It is about the internet filling up with nonhuman actors that behave like customers, researchers, and users, and do so at machine speed. We heard from experts at DataDome about what this means for the next year of cybersecurity and beyond.

The Security Trade-Off No One Wants to Admit

AI readiness has become the dominant mandate across boardrooms. Every company wants to deploy copilots, agents, and automated workflows before competitors do. The problem is that those ambitions are colliding with an unresolved backlog of basic security failures.

“Next year, organizations will face a tough trade-off…either becoming ‘AI-ready’ or finally catching up on blocking basic bots. With limited resources and intense pressure to capitalize on AI-driven opportunities, business growth will often win out over security in many cases. That means we’ll continue to see sectors like government, tech, and telecom — which are already lagging despite more than 400 billion bot attacks blocked last year — struggle to keep pace. Bot mitigation and threat analysis won’t improve until leadership treats bot traffic as a strategic risk, not an operational nuisance,” says Jerome Segura, VP of Threat Research at DataDome.

This tension is defining the next phase of cybersecurity. Bots are no longer a background annoyance inflating analytics dashboards or scraping content. They are a structural force shaping availability, fraud risk, and customer trust. Yet many organizations still relegate bot defenses to underfunded security line items rather than treating them as core business risks.

When Bots Start Acting Like People, and People Look Like Bots

The old security question was simple. Is this traffic human or automated? In 2026, that binary collapses.

“We’re noticing an increase in traffic coming from AI agents and browsers, and as bot-driven attacks grow more sophisticated, we’re seeing the landscape change in real time. In 2026, AI agents will behave much like advanced bots, leveraging residential proxies and forging payloads to mimic legitimate activity. Just as bots already imitate humans, these agentic browsers will become nearly indistinguishable from real users. Organizations won’t just be asking, ‘Is it a human or a bot?’, they’ll start to question, ‘Is it a human or AI?’” Segura explains.

This shift has profound implications. Traditional detection methods rely on behavioral signals that assume humans are slow, inconsistent, and error prone. AI agents are none of those things. They browse cleanly, act intentionally, and operate continuously. To legacy defenses, they look like ideal users.

The result is a growing identity crisis on the web. Security teams will need to authenticate intent, not just activity, and decide when automated interaction is acceptable, billable, or outright harmful.

The LLM Gold Rush Is Already Fading

For publishers and data-rich platforms, AI has so far promised salvation through licensing. Training data deals with major model providers have generated headlines and short-term revenue, but the economics are already showing cracks.

“Publishers have spent the past two years chasing big LLM licensing deals, but here’s the harsh truth: LLM licensing revenue is a temporary boost, not a sustainable business model that will carry publishers through 2026. The headline-making deals from OpenAI or Google are mostly one-time checks or short-term agreements that don’t grow with usage, and they don’t reflect the real value publishers will generate in an agent-driven world,” says Aurelie Guerrieri, Chief Marketing and Alliances Officer at DataDome.

The real shift is not about training models, but about serving them.

“The real opportunity isn’t selling training data; it’s powering real-time interactions. AI agents will visit your site thousands of times daily on behalf of users, and this transactional traffic is worth 10-100x more than what you’ll earn from training traffic. In 2026, publishers need to shift from static webpages to agent-first content delivery, providing structured, real-time APIs that AI agents can query (and pay for) per interaction,” Guerrieri says.

In this future, cybersecurity becomes inseparable from monetization. Every authenticated agent request is both a revenue opportunity and a potential abuse vector. Publishers that cannot distinguish legitimate agents from malicious automation will struggle to protect both their content and their business models.

AI Traffic Is Not a Bot Problem, It Is a Fairness Problem

Nowhere will this tension be more visible than in e-commerce. Many retailers still assume that AI agents belong in the same category as scalpers and scrapers. That assumption will not survive 2026.

“The biggest misconception companies have right now about AI traffic is that agents are a 'bot problem.’ They’re not—they’re an inventory allocation problem. By mid-2026, every e-commerce site will be flooded by tens of thousands of AI agents acting as real customers. These agents will track pricing and inventory in real-time, 24/7,” Guerrieri warns.

The consequences are predictable. The moment inventory changes, agents will move faster than any human ever could.

“Think of it like the Taylor Swift economy, where every product launch becomes a ticket sale: genuine fans, represented by bots and automated scripts, overloaded Ticketmaster's infrastructure, and tickets were gone in minutes. Fans were furious. The company faced Congressional hearings,” she says.

Now scale that scenario to sneakers, gaming consoles, fashion drops, and even household goods.

“Retailers that implement agent authentication, rate limits, and human-first purchasing windows will avoid the backlash, and regulatory scrutiny likely to occur when most units of a popular product are sold to AI agents rather than people. Those that fail to adapt risk significant customer outrage, accusations of letting ‘bots win,’ and potentially even legislative intervention.”

The Shape of Cybersecurity in 2026

By 2026, cybersecurity will be less about stopping attackers at the gates and more about governing access in an automated economy. Organizations will need to decide which machines they trust, which they charge, and which they block outright.

Bots, AI agents, and humans are converging into a single traffic stream, and the ability to tell them apart, and treat them differently, will define winners and losers. Companies that continue to treat automated traffic as background noise will be overwhelmed. Those that recognize it as a strategic force will shape the next version of the internet, one where security, fairness, and revenue are tightly intertwined.