Analysts across the security industry now run generative AI through their daily work, from log triage to incident write-ups. Active use in cybersecurity strategy reached 78% of practitioners in 2026, up from half the field a year earlier. The 2026 SANS AI Survey, drawn from 536 IT and security professionals, describes what that commitment costs to keep. Reliability trailed adoption over the year. Sixty-three percent of practitioners report significant shortcomings when AI detects or responds to threats, well above the share who said so a year earlier. The failures cluster around false positives, trouble spotting new threats, and confident output that turns out wrong. Teams running AI in production describe this as the routine experience. Trust varies by task, and the survey maps where practitioners draw the line. “Our data shows practitioners are comfortable letting AI classify threats or prioritize vulnerabilities, and far less comfortable letting it confirm a true positive or judge behavioral anomalies,” Matt Bromiley, a SANS certified instructor and incident responder, told Help Net Security.

Full report : Trust is the key ingredient of deploying AI for cyber security.