Bottom Line: AI agents significantly expand both defensive capabilities and attack surfaces, requiring security teams to rethink their architectural approaches.
Check Point CTO Jonathan Zanger views artificial intelligence as the most transformative technological change since the establishment of the Internet — with fundamental consequences for cybersecurity defense and new attack scenarios.
Jonathan Zanger, Chief Technology Officer of Check Point Software, characterizes 2026 as a turning point in cybersecurity. Speaking with CSO Spain during the company conference Engage 2026 in Paris, he described the current changes as comparable to the impact of Internet emergence on security architectures.
Zanger explained how Check Point uses AI agents to scale its own defensive mechanisms: rather than security teams manually analyzing Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs) and developing signatures, AI agents now coordinate approximately 300 continuous monitoring and testing instances. According to Zanger, the company’s own red team thereby operates 20 times more efficiently than before. However, attackers are copying this scaling advantage: a proliferation of smaller, faster-moving threat groups is emerging that can conduct phishing campaigns with less technical expertise.
A critical security problem lies in the nature of AI agents themselves. Traditional IT systems are deterministic — identical inputs lead to predictable outputs. AI agents understand natural language, handle ambiguity, and exhibit unpredictable behavior. This requires entirely new protection concepts, according to Zanger. Additionally, a fundamental conflict emerges: security teams want to limit system connections to reduce attack risk; at the same time, AI initiatives push to integrate these systems across the enterprise. Each new connection that AI agents receive expands the attack surface.
Generative AI also catalyzes attack speed. The same technology that accelerates software development enables cybercriminals to scale phishing, ransomware, malware, and exploitation campaigns in both dimensions — speed and volume. This presents a defense challenge that pushes conventional signature-based systems to their limits.
Source: www.csoonline.com · Published 10 July 2026
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