Manufacturers should assume sophisticated attackers are increasingly incorporating AI into their operations.

That doesn’t mean every attack will be fully autonomous, but as agentic systems continue to evolve, AI is becoming another force multiplier capable of accelerating attacks while adapting to changing conditions—and attackers will look for ways to use them.

Defending against AI-powered cyberattacks

The rise of agentic AI doesn’t change the fundamentals of cybersecurity. If anything, it reinforces why they matter and the importance of, to use an American football analogy, getting the blocking and tackling right.

Least-privilege access, network segmentation, credential management and layered security controls remain some of the most effective ways to interrupt an attack before it progresses through the cyber kill chain.

Every additional checkpoint forces an attacker to solve another problem and creates another opportunity to detect suspicious behavior before meaningful damage occurs. While agentic AI can compress the timeline of an attack, it doesn’t eliminate those opportunities.

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Every phase of the cyber kill chain remains a potential point of interruption. The challenge for manufacturers is to ensure there are enough defensive layers in place to stop an attack before it reaches its objective.

Organizations should also begin treating AI as part of their defensive strategy. AI-powered security tools can continuously monitor environments, identify anomalies and interrupt attacks before they progress through the kill chain. As attackers increasingly use AI to operate at machine speed, defenders will need similar capabilities to keep pace.

The goal isn’t to prevent every attempted intrusion, but to create enough defensive checkpoints that even a persistent, autonomous attacker can’t move seamlessly from one phase of an attack to the next.

The next AI arms race

The recent OpenAI and Anthropic evaluations demonstrate that AI-enabled cyber threats are no longer a future concern, but real problems we need to address today.

The good news is that the same technology reshaping cyberattacks can also strengthen cyber defense. AI can help organizations identify vulnerabilities earlier, detect unusual behavior faster and respond before an attacker completes the cyber kill chain.

Manufacturers that proactively strengthen security practices and begin incorporating AI into their defensive strategies will be better positioned as this new era of cybersecurity continues to evolve.