Beyond the Human Horizon: Cogent Q4 2026 Threat Report

Cogent Research analyzed 43 million assets across 50+ Fortune 1000 companies to measure the attack paths humans and AI agents can exploit. The findings show AI-only paths forming three times as fast as human-viable ones and outlasting them, as policies rank their findings too low.

Key findings

• Machine-viable attack paths surged 386% in a year and now outnumber human-viable ones three to one

• 26% of machine-viable attack paths contain no finding that the organization's own remediation policy ever requires fixing

• 83% of machine-viable attack paths persist for more than 30 days, compared with 55% of human-viable paths

• Machine-viable paths run twice as deep as human-viable ones, with a median of 8 asset hops versus 4

• 64% of attack paths cross domains no single security tool observes, and the median critical path needs data from five tools

  
  

What's covered

The full analysis includes depth and per-hop yield comparisons for both path types, why severity-based remediation leaves machine-viable paths standing, and a methodology section detailing data sources and thresholds.