Arctic Wolf Finds AI Fear Outpaces Common Threats

According to Arctic Wolf, 94% of respondents use large language models, and an equal share say AI capabilities influence cybersecurity purchasing decisions. Fifty-one percent consider AI functionality a vendor-evaluation requirement.

The same survey found a substantially lower level of trust in autonomous security operations. Arctic Wolf reported that only 14% of respondents have made AI central to their security operations strategy, while 53% trust AI to perform narrowly defined actions such as blocking malicious IP addresses at a firewall. The company attributed hesitation to concerns that false positives could trigger disruptive automated actions.

Arctic Wolf reported that 63% of respondents experienced a significant cybersecurity incident during the prior year, and 48% of affected organizations experienced disruption lasting at least two weeks. At the same time, 96% of leaders said they were confident their teams could keep pace with the volume and complexity of current threats.

Cybersecurity Dive noted that concerns about malware, credential theft, and cloud misconfigurations had declined from 2025 survey results, even though Arctic Wolf described those risks as continuing threats. The vendor also reported that ransomware remained the most common incident-response case handled by its incident-response operation.

The findings separate two related decisions that are often conflated: using AI-enabled tooling and delegating response authority to automated systems. Across comparable security programs, mature adoption typically depends on scoped automation, measurable false-positive rates, clear rollback controls, and continued coverage of identity, endpoint, cloud-configuration, and malware defenses. The survey's central caution is therefore operational rather than anti-AI: emerging AI risks need to be addressed alongside, rather than instead of, established attack paths.