NCSC Annual Review 2026 | Understanding the threat | The impact of AI on cyber threat | National Cyber Security Centre

The National Cyber Security Centre has published its Annual Review 2026, which includes an assessment of the impact of AI on the cyber threat. Under the heading "Understanding the threat", the review states that cyber criminal adoption of AI will "highly likely" increase the scale and efficiency of ransomware operations, social engineering and vulnerability exploitation. The review is the Centre's annual publication setting out its assessment of threats, and the AI material appears on its website, ncsc.gov.uk, as one part of that collection.

The review names three areas in which it expects criminal use of AI to have an effect: ransomware operations, social engineering and vulnerability exploitation. It states that adoption will highly likely increase both the scale and the efficiency of those activities, and it frames the assessment around cyber criminal adoption specifically. The published text does not attach a figure to the expected increase, and the judgement is expressed as a probability rather than as a certainty.

The review also addresses the reuse of security tooling. It states that open-source AI tools intended for security researchers are likely to be repurposed by criminals. That finding sits within the same assessment of AI's effect on the cyber threat as the expectation of greater scale and efficiency in ransomware, social engineering and vulnerability exploitation. The review does not, in the text published, name specific tools, give a timeframe, or estimate how widely such repurposing has already occurred.