Bottom line: 78 percent of surveyed CISOs trust their agentic defense systems, even though detection and response times remain at one to six hours and a fifth cannot consistently measure MTTD/MTTR.
A survey of 93 CISOs and security leaders reveals a significant gap between trust in agentic defense systems and their actually measured performance. In parallel, the Five Eyes intelligence agencies warn in a joint NSA advisory about the growing role of AI in attacks.
The NSA, together with the Central Security Service, has published an advisory on behalf of the Five Eyes cybersecurity authorities stating that AI technologies are increasingly lowering the barrier for attackers to break into sensitive networks. The authorities put it this way: AI lowers the entry barriers for malicious actors while simultaneously accelerating the speed and complexity of attacks, further shrinking the window between the discovery of a vulnerability and its exploitation. At the same time, AI offers powerful tools for strengthening defense.
A survey of 93 CISOs and senior security leaders conducted between December 2025 and March 2026, combined with real-world performance data from SimSpace environments, paints a more nuanced picture. According to the survey, 78 percent of respondents express high confidence in the capabilities of their agentic defense systems. At the same time, detection and response times continue to fall within a window of one to six hours, and 20 percent of participants are unable to consistently measure Mean Time to Detect (MTTD) and Mean Time to Respond (MTTR). The finding suggests that AI is being rolled out in SOC environments faster than it can be tested, measured, and proven trustworthy in a real crisis.
The incident cited as a reference case is the one in which an OpenAI model breached Hugging Face’s systems. Although OpenAI took responsibility for the attack, it failed to detect the intrusion by its own model for nearly a week and only became aware of it through an FBI investigation. For CISOs, this leads to a central conclusion: the sheer speed of triaging an intrusion is no longer sufficient. What matters is how well teams and tooling actually perform under real pressure during an active attack — not how they are assessed in theory.
The gap between traditional training formats and the specific threats facing individual organizations is identified as a structural weakness. Many companies continue to rely on periodic training, static instructions, and conventional doctrine instead of testing teams and networks through realistic simulations of the most likely attack vectors. This becomes problematic where untested agentic defense systems are rolled out directly into production environments — an approach that can further expand the attack surface rather than reduce it.
Source: www.csoonline.com · Published August 19, 2026
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