Executive Summary Since the release of our May 2026 report detailing adversarial misuse of artificial intelligence (AI), Google Threat Intelligence Group (GTIG) has observed forward leaning adversaries transition from basic prompting to agentic AI workflows and AI-enabled automation. In these operations, human-in-the-loop latency is dramatically reduced, compressing the traditional window for defenders to respond. In Q2 2026, GTIG observed threat actors compromise a cloud resource, then plan,…
Preamble In 2025 and 2026, we watched a pattern play out across the industry. Attackers stopped going after production servers directly and started targeting the automation that deploys to them. Compromised developer credentials, a modified workflow file, and suddenly every secret in a CI/CD environment is streaming to an attacker-controlled endpoint. We saw this play out across incidents involving major open-source projects, Fortune 500 companies, and critical infrastructure tooling. The…