Agentic AI and the Industrialization of Cyber Offense: Forecast, Consequences, and Defensive Priorities for Enterprises and the Mittelstand

Abstract

Agentic AI systems can plan, call tools, inspect code, interact with web applications, and coordinate multi-step workflows. These same capabilities change the economics of cyber offense. The central near-term risk is not that every low-skill criminal immediately becomes a frontier exploit researcher; it is that agentic AI compresses the attack lifecycle by lowering the cost of reconnaissance, phishing, credential abuse, vulnerability triage, exploit adaptation, and post-compromise decision suppo

Categories

@misc{koch2026agentic,
  title = {{Agentic AI and the Industrialization of Cyber Offense: Forecast, Consequences, and Defensive Priorities for Enterprises and the Mittelstand}},
  author = {Christopher Koch},
  year = {2026},
  month = may,
  eprint = {2605.06713},
  archivePrefix = {arXiv},
  url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.06713}
}