One of the most influential publications on real-world AI system design is Anthropic’s guide, Building Effective Agents. Its core message is simple: Effective AI requires structure first, adaptability second.
Anthropic emphasizes that AI agents work best when:
A deterministic workflow does all the structured work up front
The agent only activates when uncertainty remains
The agent begins with full context, not an empty slate
Tool usage is controlled and evidence-driven
Human-in-the-loop remains central for oversight and trust
These principles ensure accuracy, avoid hallucinations and keep investigations reproducible, all critical requirements for cybersecurity.
Intezer Forensic AI SOC is built on exactly this philosophy. Our platform uses a dual-mode design with Intezer AI Workflow and AI Agent, completely aligning with Anthropic’s best practices to deliver fast, scalable and highly accurate investigations across a broad range of alerts, all while keeping analysts in the loop.
Here is how Intezer implements Anthropic’s best practices for agents.
Structured first: Intezer AI Workflow handles the majority of alerts
Anthropic advises that AI systems should begin with deterministic workflows instead of free-form reasoning. In cybersecurity, this is essential for accuracy, auditability, trust and scalability (when handling huge volumes of alerts).
Intezer’s AI Workflow mode is a structured triage process designed by security experts and executed with strict consistency. It applies AI only at key decision points, not as the driver of the entire investigation.
This approach provides:
Deterministic, reproducible results
High speed due to streamlined, parallelizable steps
Lower costs because heavy reasoning is used sparingly
No drift or unexpected branching
Clear human oversight points
Most alerts, especially well-defined ones, are fully resolved at this stage, giving SOCs broad alert coverage at low cost.
Adaptive only when needed: Intezer AI Agent extends the investigation
Anthropic states that agents should activate only when the structured workflow reaches uncertainty, and only after they inherit the full context. Intezer follows this exactly.
AI Agent mode activates only when the Workflow cannot reach a high-confidence verdict.
At that point, the agent:
Starts with all evidence collected so far
Avoids premature assumptions
Uses tools deliberately and contextually
Expands the investigation where human analysts would
Surfaces deeper behavioral patterns or cross-asset correlations
This ensures the agent is guided, not free-floating, and its decisions remain grounded in evidence, not guesswork.
Tools the AI Agent can leverage once activated
Dynamic SIEM queries
EDR/XDR telemetry lookups
Identity provider (IDP) investigation
Behavioral analysis of processes and command lines
User activity mapping
Process ancestry and parent-child correlation
Intezer’s historical alert database
Code DNA similarity and malware lineage tracking
Additional host, memory, or file-based forensics
The result is deeper investigation where it matters, without unnecessary cost.
Human-in-the-loop by design
Intezer keeps human analysts at the center so they can review and override conclusions, and trace every decision made by Intezer. Of course, all evidence and reasoning is grounded in forensic data and is fully transparent and explainable for beginners and advanced analysts alike.
This aligns with Anthropic’s principle that humans remain final decision-makers, especially in high-stakes domains like cybersecurity.
How this architecture improves SOC performance
Intezer’s adherence to Anthropic’s best practices produces measurable outcomes across the three most important SOC metrics: accuracy, coverage, and speed, while also reducing cost.
Accuracy
Intezer’s approach of combining deterministic forensics + adaptive AI = best-in-class verdict quality.
The structured workflow prevents hallucinations
The AI Agent only activates with strong guardrails
Context inheritance ensures consistent reasoning
Analysts always have visibility and control
This hybrid approach dramatically reduces false positives and prevents premature conclusions.
Triage of all alerts, including low-severity (where threats often hide)
Because AI Workflows handle the bulk of alerts inexpensively and AI Agents only run when needed, heavy and expensive reasoning calls are minimized
This frees SOCs from cherry-picking which alerts to ingest allowing them to triage and investigate them all.
This is crucial for:
High-volume enterprise environments
MSSPs with strict SLAs
Cloud-scale detection pipelines
24/7 monitoring teams
You get broad alert coverage without inflating compute costs.
Speed: Structured steps + adaptive depth
Workflow mode resolves most alerts within seconds
Agents accelerate investigations that normally take analysts hours
No bottlenecks, no backlog, no manual evidence gathering
The result is a SOC where every alert is investigated quickly, consistently, and with forensic depth.
Table of how Intezer’s design reflects Anthropic’s guidance
Anthropic best practice
How Intezer implements it
Start with deterministic workflows
AI Workflow handles structured triage with predefined expert steps
Activate agents only when needed
AI Agent triggers only when confidence is insufficient
Give agents full context
Agent inherits the entire Workflow evidence set
Control tool usage
Agent selects tools based on evidence, not speculation
Maintain human-in-the-loop
Analysts can verify, guide, and override conclusions
Prioritize safety and reproducibility
Every action is logged, justified, and traceable
Conclusion: Anthropic’s Agent principles in a real SOC
Anthropic’s framework for building effective agents is now influencing industries far beyond general AI research. Intezer Forensic AI SOC might be one of the strongest real-world implementations of these practices in cybersecurity.
By combining:
Deterministic workflows for reliable baseline investigations
Microsoft’s 5-point plan to partner with local communities across the United States
This year marks America’s 250th year of independence. One of the trends that has repeatedly shaped the nation’s history is again in the news. As we’re experiencing at Microsoft, AI is the latest in a long line of new technologies to require large-scale infrastructure development.
Microsoft today is launching a new initiative to build what we call Community-First AI Infrastructure—a commitment to do this work differently than some others and to do it responsibly. This commits us to the concrete steps needed to be a good neighbor in the communities where we build, own, and operate our datacenters. It reflects our sense of civic responsibility as well as a broad and long-term view of what it will take to run a successful AI infrastructure business. In short, we will set a high bar.
As we launch this initiative, we think about it in the context of both the headlines of the day and the lessons from the past. Beginning in the 1770s, the country has advanced through successive eras built on huge infrastructure development based on canals, railroads, power plants, and the electrical grid, followed by the telephone system, highways, and airports. AI infrastructure has become the next chapter in this story.
Like major buildouts of the past, AI infrastructure is expensive and complex. Investments are advancing at a rapid pace. Today, these require large-scale spending by the private sector in land, construction, electricity, liquid cooling, high-bandwidth connectivity, and operations. This revives a longstanding question: how can our nation build transformative infrastructure in a way that strengthens, rather than strains, the local communities where it takes root?
Large AI investments are accelerating just as datacenter concerns are growing in local communities. The pattern is familiar. Whether it was canals, railroads, the electrical grid, or the interstate highway system, each era produced its own conflicts over who bore the burdens of progress. One enduring lesson is that successful infrastructure buildouts will only progress when communities feel that the gains outweigh the costs. Long-term success requires a commitment to address public needs, including by the private companies making these investments.
This must start by understanding local concerns. Residential electricity rates have recently risen in dozens of states, driven in part by several years of inflation, supply chain constraints, and long-overdue grid upgrades. Communities value new jobs and property tax revenue, but not if they come with higher power bills or tighter water supplies. Without addressing these issues directly, even supportive communities will question the role of datacenters in their backyard.
As a company, we believe in the many positive advances AI will bring to America’s future. From stronger economic growth to better medical advances and more affordable products, we believe AI will make a difference in everyday lives. But we also recognize that AI, like other fundamental technological shifts, will create new challenges as well. And we believe that tech companies like Microsoft have both a unique opportunity to help contribute to these advances and a heightened responsibility to address these challenges head-on.
This Community-First AI Infrastructure Initiative provides a framework for doing exactly that. It is anchored in five commitments, each a clear promise to the communities where we build, own, and operate Microsoft datacenters. These are:
We’ll pay our way to ensure our datacenters don’t increase your electricity prices.
We’ll minimize our water use and replenish more of your water than we use.
We’ll create jobs for your residents.
We’ll add to the tax base for your local hospitals, schools, parks, and libraries.
We’ll strengthen your community by investing in local AI training and nonprofits.
We describe our plans in detail below. We recognize that these will evolve and improve, based most importantly on what we learn from ongoing engagement with local communities across the country. We’ll also follow this plan for Community-First AI Infrastructure with similar plans for other countries, shaped to reflect their local needs and traditions.
But we are choosing the beginning of 2026 in Washington, DC to launch this effort in the United States. Our goal is to move quickly, partner with local communities, and bring these commitments to life in the first half of this year.
1.Electricity: We’ll pay our way to ensure our datacenters don’t increase your electricity prices.
There’s no denying that AI consumes large amounts of electricity. While advances in technology may someday change this, today, this is the reality.
The United States will retain its AI leadership role only if AI infrastructure can tap into a rapidly growing supply of electricity. The International Energy Agency (IEA) estimates that US datacenter electricity demand will more than triple by 2035, growing from 200 terawatt-hours to 640 terawatt-hours per year. This growth is taking place alongside rapid electrification of manufacturing and other sectors of the economy.
Our nation is addressing this reality at a demanding time. Even in the absence of datacenter construction, the United States is facing major electricity challenges. Much of the country’s electricity transmission infrastructure is more than 40 years old, and it’s under strain. Supply chain constraints on transformers and high-voltage equipment are delaying upgrades that would enable existing lines to deliver more electricity. New transmission can take more than 7 to 10 years due to permitting and siting delays. This creates a mismatch with growing electricity demand.
Some have suggested that AI will be so beneficial that the public should help pay for the added electricity the country needs for it. We believe in the benefits AI will create, but we disagree with this approach. Especially when tech companies are so profitable, we believe that it’s both unfair and politically unrealistic for our industry to ask the public to shoulder added electricity costs for AI. Instead, we believe the long-term success of AI infrastructure requires that tech companies pay their own way for the electricity costs they create.
This will require that we take four steps, and we’re committed to each:
First, we’ll ask utilities and public commissions to set our rates high enough to cover the electricity costs for our datacenters. This includes the costs of adding and using the electricity infrastructure needed for the datacenters we build, own, and operate. We will work closely with utility companies that set electricity prices and state commissions that approve these prices. Our goal is straightforward: to ensure that the electricity cost of serving our datacenters is not passed on to residential customers.
In some areas, communities are already starting to benefit from this approach. In Wyoming, for example, Microsoft and Black Hills Energy have developed an innovative utility partnership that ensures our datacenter growth strengthens—rather than burdens—the local community. And as part of our datacenter investment in Wisconsin, we are supporting a new rate structure that would charge “Very Large Customers,” including datacenters, the cost of the electricity required to serve them. This protects residents by preventing those costs from being passed on. But we recognize the need to ensure that datacenter communities benefit everywhere. We believe this approach can and should be a model for other states.
Second, we’ll collaborate early, closely, and transparently with local utilities to add electricity and the supporting infrastructure to the grid when needed for our datacenters. Addressing electricity costs is critical, but it is an incomplete solution for local communities unless we expand electricity supply. This expansion typically requires a complex effort that includes the expansion of electrical generation capacity and improvements in transmission and substation systems.
We’re committed to collaborating with local utilities. We will sit down and plan together, providing early transparency around our projected power requirements and contracting in advance for the electricity we will use. When our datacenter expansion requires improvements in transmission and substation capabilities, we will continue our existing practices by paying for these improvements.
This work will build on a spirit of partnership with utilities we’ve worked to foster across the country. For example, in the wholesale energy market that covers much of the Midwest called the Midcontinent Independent System Operator (MISO), we have contracted to add 7.9 GW of new electricity generation to the grid, which is more than double our current consumption.
Third, we’ll pursue innovation to make our datacenters more efficient. We are also using AI to reduce energy use and improve the performance of our software and hardware in the design and management of our datacenters. And we are collaborating closely with utilities to leverage tools like AI to improve planning, get more electricity from existing lines and equipment, improve system resilience and durability, and speed the development of new infrastructure, including nuclear energy technologies.
By embedding these innovations into datacenters and by collaborating directly with local utilities, communities gain access to systems that are more efficient, more reliable, and better prepared to support growth without increasing costs for households.
Fourth, we’ll advocate for the state and national public policies needed to support our neighboring communities with affordable, reliable, and sustainable power. Public policy plays an essential role in supporting communities with affordable, reliable, and sustainable access to electricity. In 2022, Microsoft established priorities for electricity policy advocacy: expanding clean electricity generation, modernizing the grid, and engaging local communities. Over the past three years, we have advocated across all three areas and engaged with government leaders at the federal, state, and local levels to do so. To date, however, progress has been uneven. This needs to change.
We will advocate for policies across these areas with an urgent focus on accelerating project permitting and interconnection of electricity projects, expediting the planning and expansion of the electricity grid, and designing new electricity rates for large electricity users.
2. Water: We’ll minimize our water use and replenish more of your water than we use.
Across the country, communities are asking pointed questions about how datacenters use water. These are arising in places already facing water stress, like Phoenix and Atlanta, as well as regions with more abundant supply, like Wisconsin. These concerns are often amplified by aging municipal water systems and infrastructure gaps. Local communities want and deserve reassurance that new AI infrastructure won’t strain their water resources.
Our commitment ensures that our presence will strengthen local water systems rather than burden them. We’ll do this by reducing the amount of water we use and by investing in local water systems and water replenishment projects.
First, we’re committed to reducing the amount of water our datacenters use. The chips that power datacenters produce heat. To manage that heat, datacenters historically relied upon evaporative cooling systems that drew on large volumes of water for cooling in hot weather. As AI workloads have increased, the demand for cooling has increased. The GPU chips that power AI workloads run at very high temperatures; without proper cooling, these chips would burn out within minutes.
The good news is that the tech sector has invested in new innovations to address these cooling needs. Now is the time when we need to step up, use these new technologies, and take added steps to address water use concerns.
Across our entire owned fleet of datacenters, we are committed as a company to a 40 percent improvement in datacenter water-use intensity by 2030. We are optimizing water usage for cooling, improving our ability to balance between water-based cooling and air cooling based on environmental conditions. We have also launched a new AI datacenter design that uses a closed-loop system. By constantly recirculating a cooling liquid, we can dramatically cut our water usage. In this next-generation design, already deployed in locations such as Wisconsin and Georgia, potable water is no longer needed for cooling, reducing pressure on local freshwater systems.
For communities where water infrastructure constraints pose challenges, we will collaborate with local utilities to understand whether current systems can support the additional demand associated with datacenter growth. If sufficient capacity does not exist, we work with our engineering teams to identify solutions that avoid burdening the community.
This approach will build on what we’ve learned from the recent work at our datacenters in Quincy, Washington, an arid region where the local groundwater supply was already under pressure. To avoid drawing from the community’s potable water, we partnered with the city to construct the Quincy Water Reuse Utility, which treats and recirculates datacenter cooling water rather than relying on local groundwater. This approach protects limited drinking-water supplies while ensuring that high-quality, recycled water can be used for datacenter cooling needs. Where future system improvements are required, Microsoft funds those upgrades in full, ensuring that the community doesn’t have to shoulder the cost of supporting our operations.
We also partner with utilities from day one to map out water, wastewater, and pressure needs, and we fully fund the infrastructure required for growth, ensuring local water systems are resilient. Beyond our own footprint, we invest directly in community water infrastructure, modernizing water systems, expanding access, increasing water reliability, and helping utilities maintain stable rates and pressure. For example, near our datacenter in Leesburg, Virginia, Microsoft is funding more than $25 million of water and sewer improvements to ensure the cost of serving our facilities does not fall on local ratepayers.
Second, we will ensure that we replenish more water than we withdraw. This means restoring measurable amounts of water to the same water districts where our datacenter’s water is used, so the total water returned exceeds total water used. This standard provides greater transparency and precision in tracking and reporting, aligned with emerging industry standards.
We will pursue projects that make the most important water contribution to each local community. For example, in the greater Phoenix area and nearby Nevada communities, our leak detection partnerships with local utilities identify and repair hidden breaks in aging water systems, preventing water losses and keeping municipal water in circulation for community use. These projects both add to the total usable water supply and improve the reliability of service for residents.
Across the Midwest, we are restoring historic oxbow wetlands. These are crescent-shaped water bodies that naturally recharge groundwater, reduce flood risk, and enhance habitats for native species. These wetlands act as nature’s reservoirs, capturing and slowly returning water to local aquifers throughout both wet seasons and droughts, creating year-round value for farms, ecosystems, and nearby communities.
Overall, we approach replenishment the same way a household might think about a bank account: our operations make water withdrawals, and our replenishment projects make deposits. Some deposits, like our leak detection projects, go straight into the checking account—depositing water into the municipal supply for immediate community use. Others, like wetland restoration, go into a savings account—investing in the watershed’s long-term capacity to store and supply the region. These projects are evaluated using recognized methods that convert on-the-ground improvements into measurable gallons (or cubic meters) of water restored to local ecosystems, ensuring that commitments reflect tangible local benefits, not abstract promises.
Third, we will support this work with greater local transparency. People deserve to know how much water our datacenters use, and we are committed to making that information accessible, clear, and easy to understand. Aligned with this goal, we will begin publishing water-use data for each datacenter region in the country, as well as our progress on replenishment. This approach will ensure that communities can understand both our operational footprint and the progress we are making against our water-positive goals.
Fourth, we will advocate for public policies to help minimize water use and strengthen resilience. This means championing policies that enable sustainable growth while safeguarding community resources. We will support state and federal efforts to make reclaimed and industrial recycled water the default supply for datacenters wherever feasible. We will advocate for harmonized transparency standards that allow communities to clearly understand water use and stewardship practices. And we will work to reduce permitting delays by promoting predictable pathways for water-efficient datacenter projects.
These actions reflect our belief that technology and environmental responsibility must advance together, ensuring that AI-driven progress aligns with long-term water resilience for people, places, and ecosystems. Our policy activities are rooted in protecting local communities. By prioritizing recycled water and efficiency, we will help reduce pressure on aging municipal systems and ensure reliable water access for people and businesses.
3.We’ll create jobs for your residents.
New datacenters create jobs—typically thousands during construction and hundreds during operations. For example, in Washington state more than 1,300 skilled trades workers are building Microsoft datacenters and by the end of next year more than 650 full-time employees and contractors will work across all our operational facilities there.
One of our goals is to help ensure that workers from the local community benefit from these opportunities. To achieve this, we will invest in new partnerships to help give local residents the skills and opportunities to fill these jobs in both the construction and operational phases.
The AI infrastructure construction boom is driving large-scale physical development, creating a huge demand for skilled tradespeople nationwide. As datacenters and the energy projects that support them grow quickly, firms are vying for a limited workforce. At one level, this is good news for people who already have the qualifications these jobs require. But at another level, there is a risk the jobs will not go to local residents who want to pursue these jobs unless they can acquire the skills required.
We will take a multifaceted approach.
First, we will invest in partnerships to help train local workers to support the construction and maintenance of datacenters. This includes a new and first-of-its-kind partnership between Microsoft and North America’s Building Trades Unions (NABTU) to strengthen apprenticeship and training programs in the skilled trades where datacenters are being built. We are launching today a new agreement that establishes a cooperative framework to focus on building a pipeline of skilled workers in regions where we are building datacenters. This will also help enable NABTU to identify qualified contractor partners to bid on our infrastructure projects.
Second, we will expand our Datacenter Academy program to train individuals to fill ongoing datacenter operations roles. This program works in partnership with local community colleges and vocational schools to train students for critical roles in datacenter operations and related careers, once construction is complete.
A good example of this work is our Datacenter Academy partnerships in Boydton, Virginia, where we have a large datacenter campus. The Academy works with Southside Virginia Community College and the Southern Virginia Higher Education Center, which have helped hundreds of students and adult learners earn industry-recognized certifications in information technology and critical facilities operations.
In 2024, this work expanded with the opening of a new Critical Environment Training Lab (SoVA) in South Hill. This provides hands-on training with electrical, mechanical, and cooling systems using decommissioned datacenter equipment donated by Microsoft. Graduates of these programs have gone on to pursue careers supporting datacenter operations in Southern Virginia, including roles with Microsoft and the broader ecosystem of companies that help operate and maintain digital infrastructure. We will pursue similar partnerships in other states, and we are committed to making this an ongoing part of our work in the communities where we build new datacenters.
Third, we will use our voice to encourage policymakers to support these new job opportunities. While this work is of heightened importance in communities with datacenters, the broader need for this type of skilled labor is national in scope. According to LinkedIn data, job postings for data center occupations or requiring at least one core data center skill, such as data center operations, grew by 23 percent globally and 13.5 percent in the US year-over-year in 2025. This is likely to represent an ongoing trend. Over the next decade, trillions in private investment will offer steady employment opportunities for American workers—including electricians, pipefitters, HVAC techs, welders, and construction crews—alongside manufacturing technicians for related components, like chips, power generation, and cooling systems.
However, this rapid demand for skilled labor is set to outpace the available pipeline of workers. Today, the Associated Builders and Contractors estimates that the construction industry is short roughly 439,000 workers, mostly among skilled workers who do things like lay pipe and wire electrical panels.[1] Manufacturers report shortages as well, with the CEO of Ford Motor Company recently highlighting 5,000 open mechanic jobs that pay more than $100,000 per year. And for datacenter operations, employers face shortages in hands-on infrastructure skills such as cabling, racking, and network hardware.
This problem is exacerbated by the demographics of an aging workforce and a decades-old policy trend of deprioritizing vocational education for young Americans. A generation of skilled workers, vocationally trained in high schools and apprenticeships in the 20th century, are retiring from the trades. In the first quarter-century of the 21st century, high schools pivoted towards preparing young people for higher education and advanced degrees, often at the expense of traditional shop classes and training in skilled craftsmanship.
The increased demand for skilled trades, paired with an aging workforce, requires an enhanced public-private workforce partnership. Secondary schools in the US can be incentivized to do more to educate young people about the trades through vocational schools and pre-apprenticeship programs. Registered apprenticeship programs offered nationally provide a fulfilling career path with long-term wages and benefits.
In partnership with labor, the federal government can champion a national apprenticeship and workforce development initiative that helps young and aspiring American workers near AI infrastructure projects, especially in rural and post-industrial regions. President Trump’s AI Action Plan rightly identifies this opportunity, and we will work closely with the Department of Labor to help scale this effort. The federal government can also help by streamlining the process by which businesses can establish and maintain a registered apprenticeship program. They can also maximize the use of existing federal dollars that directly support registered apprenticeship programs. This could entail modernizing the regulations for the National Apprenticeship Act or updating the statutory language itself.
4.We will add to the tax base for your local hospitals, schools, parks, and libraries.
One of the most tangible benefits from datacenter development is invisible to an individual driving nearby. It’s the property taxes paid by datacenters to the local municipality, which are substantial. But this too requires that the private sector take a responsible approach, as described below.
We won’t ask local municipalities to reduce their local property tax rates when we buy land or propose a datacenter presence. Instead, we’ll pay our full and fair share of local property taxes, adding revenue to local towns and cities. This is obviously critical to supporting the growth a local community often experiences when datacenters are built or expanded. And most importantly, at a time when many communities are facing revenue shortages that threaten vital public assets like hospitals, schools, parks, and libraries, we know from experience that this can make a big difference.
The benefits of this approach are nowhere more apparent than in Quincy, Washington, a small agricultural community about 150 miles east of Seattle where Microsoft built its first datacenter in 2008. Since then, we have built more than twenty datacenters in the area, providing ongoing employment to thousands of construction workers for almost two decades. Hundreds of technicians enjoy permanent jobs in those datacenters, earning salaries well above the median income for Quincy. And we estimate that for every direct construction job created, another one is created in related sectors, including security services, maintenance and repair, retail, restaurants, and more. Altogether, our datacenters drive more than $200 million in regional economic activity each year.
As a result, the share of Quincy residents living below the poverty line has been cut in half, dropping from 29.4 percent in 2013 to 13.1 percent in 2023. And county property tax revenues have more than tripled over the past two decades, from roughly $60 million to more than $180 million. This has enabled the city to invest in public services and amenities. Last year, as rural hospitals around the country cut back on critical care offerings and shuttered their doors, Quincy opened a new 54,000-square-foot medical center. The city has also made substantial renovations to its high school, adding state-of-the-art athletic facilities, an auditorium, and a career and technical training department.
We want to make sure that the other communities where our datacenters are located benefit from our presence in the same way. In all the regions where we build, own, and operate datacenters, we’re devoted to taking a civically responsible approach. This means recognizing the importance of civic services, including public safety, local healthcare, schools, libraries, and parks. As we become an important local employer, local communities can count on us to be a constructive contributor to local business and civic efforts.
5. We’ll strengthen your community by investing in local AI training and nonprofits.
We believe the datacenter communities that power AI should be among the first to benefit from it. As these communities help drive innovation and economic growth for the nation, it’s essential that they share in the economic, educational, and community benefits AI is creating. Especially as jobs evolve and require more AI skills, this requires local investments in AI education and training. To support this goal, we will provide free, age-appropriate, best-in-class AI training and education in these communities in partnership with trusted, local community-based organizations.
For years, we have been helping people gain essential digital skills in communities in and around our datacenters, such as Quincy in Eastern Washington, Boydton in Southern Virginia, and Mt. Pleasant in Southeast Wisconsin. One thing we’ve learned is that these communities have vibrant anchor institutions—schools, libraries, and local chambers of commerce—that form the backbone of local learning, workforce development, and economic growth. That’s why our approach as we go forward will be to invest in communities with our datacenters to partner with and provide support to these anchor institutions so that every community member can leverage the power of AI in how they live, work, and learn.
First, we will partner with local K-12 schools, community colleges, and universities to provide age-appropriate, responsible AI literacy training and learning experiences for students and teachers in our datacenter communities. This will build on some of our most recent experiences. For example, in Quincy, Washington, we partnered with Quincy High School and the local FFA chapter to teach students the critical AI and data skills needed for careers in precision agriculture. And in our datacenter region in Mt. Pleasant, Wisconsin, we recently launched an AI bootcamp for students and faculty with Gateway Technical College to cultivate a new generation of developers and creators of AI tools and technology across Wisconsin technical colleges.
Our commitment is to build on this work to help students and teachers responsibly and effectively engage with AI, create with AI, manage AI, and design with AI by bringing free, locally relevant, responsible AI training that is aligned with AI literacy standards to students in every K-12 school, community college, and university in our datacenter markets.
Second, we will support adults in our datacenter communities with AI tools and skills by creating neighborhood AI learning hubs in partnership with local libraries in our key datacenter markets. This approach will build upon our previous digital skilling partnerships with local libraries. For example, during COVID, we partnered with libraries in rural communities across the country, and more recently, we helped train libraries in our Quincy and Mt. Pleasant datacenter markets on AI so that they could help their patrons learn AI skills. Building on this work, we will invest in AI literacy skills development for librarians and provide access to free AI literacy training and certifications to local library patrons, including by equipping public terminals at local libraries in our datacenter regions with AI tools and services.
Third, we will support AI skills training for small businesses. We recognize that AI training will be critical for small businesses as they navigate the transition to the AI economy. These businesses are the backbone of local economies, and their success directly impacts job creation, workforce stability, and community vitality. Through a new workforce transformation initiative, we will deliver AI training, tools, and insights to local chambers of commerce that support these small businesses. We will also provide flexible grants for AI training and upskilling to local chambers of commerce and a variety of workforce organizations to help local businesses upskill employees, adopt AI responsibly, and prepare their workforce for ongoing transformation—ensuring that economic opportunity stays rooted in the communities where we build and operate datacenters.
Finally, we will invest in your local nonprofit community. A defining aspect of Microsoft’s own history and culture has long been a commitment to support the many nonprofit organizations that are vital to every community the company calls home. As we expand our datacenters in new communities, we’re committed to bringing this role to these new regions.
This starts with support for our employees in the local community. We provide two key benefits to all our full-time employees. First, we will match every hour they spend volunteering for a nonprofit with a donation to that group of $25. Second, we’ll match each dollar they donate to a nonprofit with an equal donation by Microsoft. These give all our employees, including in our datacenters, a total potential match of $15,000 each year.
This approach to community engagement is an important part of Microsoft’s culture, and it has become the largest nonprofit charitable matching program in the history of business. In 2024 in the United States, it raised $229.1 million in donations for 29,000 nonprofits, plus 964,000 volunteer hours contributed by our employees. It’s a part of Microsoft we’re excited to bring to the communities that have our datacenters.
We recognize that our support for the local community also needs to go beyond this type of program. Our broader contribution must start with listening. You know best what your town needs, what nonprofits are making a difference, and which organizations are best positioned to do more. We will provide locally based Microsoft liaisons in major US datacenter communities to work side by side with local leaders and nonprofits. Our local staff will provide a community connection to our various Microsoft teams and resources. Working together, we will shape our direction and connection to help further our support for local nonprofits.
Conclusion
Many lessons emerge from the nation’s 250-year history relating to technology and infrastructure. The first is that large-scale infrastructure expansion is vital to economic growth and everyday improvements in people’s lives. Our lives today rely on electrical appliances, automobiles, phones, airplanes, and much more that would be impossible without modern infrastructure.
But a second lesson illustrates an important tension. Major infrastructure expansion is always difficult. It’s expensive. It inevitably raises questions, concerns, and even controversies. This has been true for more than 200 years, and we should assume it will be true well into the future. This always requires that important decisions be made by government leaders from village presidents and town councils to the American President and Congress.
Third, the most important decisions are often made at the local level. This reflects the outsized impact—both positive and negative—of infrastructure expansion at the local level. It also reflects the American political tradition and our zoning and permitting laws, which rightly put decision-making authority closest to those elected to serve local communities.
There’s a final lesson that speaks most directly to us. Private companies can help by stepping up and acting in a responsible way. We cannot surmount inevitable community challenges by ourselves. But we can make everything easier by embracing a long-term vision. By recognizing our responsibility. By playing a constructive role. And by supporting the entire community.
As we look to the future, we are committing to taking this final lesson to heart. And making it a fundamental part of our efforts every day.
Grok’s failure to block sexualized images of minors has turned a single “isolated lapse” into a global regulatory stress test for xAI’s ambitions. The response from lawmakers and regulators suggests this will not be solved with a quick apology and a hotfix.
Last week we reported on Grok’s apology after it generated an image of young girls in “sexualized attire.”
The apology followed the introduction of Grok’s paid “Spicy Mode” in August 2025, which was marketed as edgy and less censored. In practice it enabled users to generate sexual deepfake images, including content that may cross into illegal child sexual abuse material (CSAM) under US and other jurisdictions’ laws.
A report from web-monitoring tool CopyLeaks highlighted “thousands” of incidents of Grok being used to create sexually suggestive images of non-consenting celebrities.
This is starting to backfire. Reportedly, three US senators are asking Google and Apple to remove Elon Musk’s Grok and X apps from their app stores, citing the spread of nonconsensual sexualized AI images of women and minors and arguing it violates the companies’ app store rules.
“In recent days, X users have used the app’s Grok AI tool to generate nonconsensual sexual imagery of real, private citizens at scale. This trend has included Grok modifying images to depict women being sexually abused, humiliated, hurt, and even killed. In some cases, Grok has reportedly created sexualized images of children—the most heinous type of content imaginable.”
The UK government also threatens to take possible action against the platform. Government officials have said they would fully support any action taken by Ofcom, the independent media regulator, against X. Even if that meant UK regulators could block the platform.
Indonesia and Malaysia already blocked Grok after its “digital undressing” function flooded the internet with suggestive and obscene manipulated images of women and minors.
As it turns out, a user prompted Grok to generate its own “apology,” which it did. After backlash over sexualized images of women and minors, Grok/X announced limits on image generation and editing for paying subscribers only, effectively paywalling those capabilities on main X surfaces.
For lawmakers already worried about disinformation, election interference, deepfakes, and abuse imagery, Grok is fast becoming the textbook case for why “move fast and break things” doesn’t mix with AI that can sexualize real people on demand.
Hopefully, the next wave of rules, ranging from EU AI enforcement to platform-specific safety obligations, will treat this incident as the baseline risk that all large-scale visual models must withstand, not as an outlier.
Keep your children safe
If you ever wondered why parents post images of their children with a smiley across their face, this is the reason.
Don’t make it easy for strangers to copy, reuse, or manipulate your photos.
This incident is yet another compelling reason to reduce your digital footprint. Think carefully before posting photos of yourself, your children, or other sensitive information on public social media accounts.
And treat everything you see online—images, voices, text—as potentially AI-generated unless they can be independently verified. They’re not only used to sway opinions, but also to solicit money, extract personal information, or create abusive material.
We don’t just report on threats – we help protect your social media
The New Frontier of Agentic Development: Accelerating Developer Productivity
The world of software development is undergoing a rapid transformation, driven by the rise of AI agents and autonomous tools. Factory is advancing this shift through agent-native development, a new paradigm where developers focus on high-level design and agents, called Droids, handle the execution. Designed to support work across the software development lifecycle, these agents enable a new mode of development, delivering significant gains in speed and productivity, without sacrificing developer control.
As developer workflows increasingly rely on autonomous development agents, the way software is built evolves. This shift introduces important security considerations, such as prompt injection, sensitive data loss, unsafe URL access and malicious code execution, which, if left unaddressed, can undermine the very benefits these agents offer. Accelerating productivity depends not just on deploying agents, but on deploying them securely. This is where Palo Alto Networks, with its purpose-built AI security platform, Prisma® AIRS™, plays a critical role.
The Productivity Paradox: Where Agents Introduce Risk
Autonomous agents operating across the software development lifecycle accelerate developer productivity, while also introducing a complex, language-driven threat surface that traditional security tools are not equipped to handle. As a result, new risks emerge, such as prompt injection or leaking secrets that extend beyond the visibility and control assumptions of traditional security approaches. Addressing these considerations is essential to preserving the benefits that agentic development provides.
Recognizing this shift, Palo Alto Networks has introduced targeted capabilities to accelerate secure development workflows. These efforts focus on three critical defense areas: preventing prompt injection, blocking sensitive data leaks and enabling robust malicious code detection capabilities, all of which are necessary to secure the full lifecycle of agent-driven systems.
The Solution: Securing Agentic Workflows for Acceleration
The solution is designed to convert security challenges directly into deployment confidence, dramatically accelerating productivity. By natively integrating Prisma AIRS within Factory’s Droid Shield Plus, the platform is able to inspect all large language model (LLM) interactions, including prompts, responses and subsequent tool calls, to enable comprehensive security across each interaction with the agent.
Prisma AIRS is a comprehensive platform designed to provide organizations with the visibility and control needed to safeguard AI agents across any environment. The platform continuously monitors agent behavior in real time to detect and prevent threats unique to agent-driven systems.
Droid Shield Plus, powered by Palo Alto Networks
How Security Drives Speed
Embedding security natively into the Factory platform enables two crucial outcomes. To start, it delivers a secure, agent-native development experience for every developer, fostering immediate trust in the integrity of the generated code and documentation. This assurance removes friction often associated with AI-powered workflows, which can accelerate enterprise adoption and scaling of the Factory platform across the organization.
When developers can trust the agents and the integrity of the generated code and documentation, they can innovate faster and deploy with greater confidence. Instead of waiting for security reviews or dealing with fragmentation, security is woven seamlessly into the development lifecycle.
Factory-Prisma AIRS Integration Flow
The integration follows a clear API Intercept design pattern:
• When a user enters a prompt or initiates work in Factory, Prisma AIRS intercepts the workflow. If a malicious prompt is detected, the platform can add logic to coach or block the user.
• Similarly, after the LLM generates code, Prisma AIRS intercepts the generated content. If secrets are detected, the platform again adds logic to coach or block the result before it reaches Factory or the user.
This real-time inspection of prompts and generated code enables development teams to be protected against threats, such as privilege escalation, prompt injection and malicious code execution, without disrupting developer velocity.
Deploy Bravely
Prisma AIRS 2.0 establishes a unified foundation for scalable and secure AI innovation. By combining Factory’s agent-native development platform with the threat detection capabilities of Palo Alto Networks Prisma AIRS, organizations gain a powerful advantage. Together, this approach helps organizations adopt agentic development with confidence by embedding security directly into the development experience.
For enterprises looking to confidently scale AI automation and realize the immense productivity gains offered by Factory’s Droids, integrating Prisma AIRS is the next step. This combined approach enables teams to "Deploy Bravely." To learn more about this strategic partnership and integration, see our latest integration announcement and review the Droid Shield Plus integration documentation.
Key Takeaways for Secure Agentic Development
When adopting Factory with Prisma AIRS, enterprises realize immediate benefits that accelerate their AI strategy:
Specialized Threat Defense
Enterprises gain real-time, targeted protection against agent-specific threats, specifically prompt injection attacks and data leaks, which legacy tools cannot address.
Native, Seamless Security Moving from a fragmented review process to a continuous, automated defense via API Interception, security enables compliance without slowing down development velocity.
Deployment Confidence The native integration transforms security risks into operational assurance, accelerating the large-scale enterprise adoption and scaling of your Factory agent-native automation initiatives.
How comfortable are you with sharing your medical history with an AI?
I’m certainly not.
OpenAI’s announcement about its new ChatGPT Health program prompted discussions about data privacy and how the company plans to keep the information users submit safe.
ChatGPT Health is a dedicated “health space” inside ChatGPT that lets users connect their medical records and wellness apps so the model can answer health and wellness questions in a more personalized way.
OpenAI promises additional, layered protections designed specifically for health, “to keep health conversations protected and compartmentalized.”
First off, it’s important to understand that this is not a diagnostic or treatment system. It’s framed as a support tool to help understand health information and prepare for care.
But this is the part that raised questions and concerns:
“You can securely connect medical records and wellness apps to ground conversations in your own health information, so responses are more relevant and useful to you.”
In other words, ChatGPT Health lets you link medical records and apps such as Apple Health, MyFitnessPal, and others so the system can explain lab results, track trends (e.g., cholesterol), and help you prepare questions for clinicians or compare insurance options based on your health data.
Given our reservations about the state of AI security in general and chatbots in particular, this is a line that I don’t dare cross. For now, however, I don’t even have the option, since only users with ChatGPT Free, Go, Plus, and Pro plans outside of the European Economic Area, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom can sign up for the waitlist.
OpenAI only uses partners and apps in ChatGPT Health that meet OpenAI’s privacy and security requirements, which, by design, shifts a great deal of trust onto ChatGPT Health itself.
Users should realize that health information is very sensitive and as Sara Geoghegan, senior counsel at the Electronic Privacy Information Center told The Record: by sharing their electronic medical records with ChatGPT Health, users in the US could effectively remove the HIPAA protection from those records, which is a serious consideration for anyone sharing medical data.
She added:
“ChatGPT is only bound by its own disclosures and promises, so without any meaningful limitation on that, like regulation or a law, ChatGPT can change the terms of its service at any time.”
Should you decide to try this new feature out, we would advise you to proceed with caution and take the advice to enable 2FA for ChatGPT to heart. OpenAI claims 230 million users already ask ChatGPT health and wellness questions each week. I’d encourage them to do the same.
We don’t just report on data privacy—we help you remove your personal information
Cybersecurity risks should never spread beyond a headline. With Malwarebytes Personal Data Remover, you can scan to find out which sites are exposing your personal information, and then delete that sensitive data from the internet.
Global adoption of artificial intelligence continued to rise in the second half of 2025, increasing by 1.2 percentage points compared to the first half of the year, with roughly one in six people worldwide now using generative AI tools, remarkable progress for a technology that only recently entered mainstream use.
To track this trend, we measure AI diffusion as the share of people worldwide who have used a generative AI product during the reported period. This measure is derived from aggregated and anonymized Microsoft telemetry and then adjusted to reflect differences in OS and device-market share, internet penetration, and country population. Additional details on the methodology are available in our AI Diffusion technical paper.[1]
No single metric is perfect, and this one is no exception. Through the Microsoft AI Economy Institute, we continue to refine how we measure AI diffusion globally, including how adoption varies across countries in ways that best advance priorities such as scientific discovery and productivity gains. For this report, we rely on the strongest cross-country measure available today, and we expect to complement it over time with additional indicators as they emerge and mature.
Despite progress in AI adoption, the data shows a widening divide: adoption in the Global North grew nearly twice as fast as in the Global South. As a result, 24.7 percent of the working age population in the Global North is now using these tools, compared to only 14.1 percent in the Global South.
Countries that have invested early in digital infrastructure, AI skilling, and government adoption, such as the United Arab Emirates, Singapore, Norway, Ireland, France, and Spain, continue to lead. The UAE extended its lead as the #1 ranked country, with 64.0 percent of the working age population using AI at the end of 2025, compared to 59.4 percent earlier in the year. The UAE has opened a lead of more than three percentage points over Singapore, which continues in second place with 60.9 percent adoption.
The second half of the year in the United States shows that leadership in innovation and infrastructure, while critical, does not by themselves lead to broad AI adoption. The U.S. leads in both AI infrastructure and frontier model development, but it fell from 23rd to 24th place in AI usage among the working age population, with a 28.3 percent usage rate. It lags far behind smaller, more highly digitized and AI-focused economies.
South Korea stands out as the clearest end-of-year success story. It surged seven spots in the global rankings, climbing from 25th to 18th, driven by government policies, improved frontier model capabilities in the Korean language, and consumer-facing features that resonated with the population. Generative AI is now used in schools, workplaces, and public services, and South Korea has become one of ChatGPT’s fastest-growing markets, leading OpenAI to open an office in Seoul.[2]
A parallel development reshaping the global landscape in 2025 was the rapid rise of DeepSeek, an open-source AI platform that has gained significant traction in markets long underserved by traditional providers. By releasing its model under an open-source MIT license and offering a completely free chatbot, DeepSeek removed both financial and technical barriers that limit access to advanced AI. Its strongest adoption, not surprisingly has emerged across China, Russia, Iran, Cuba, and Belarus. But perhaps even more notable is DeepSeek’s surging popularity across Africa, where it is aided by strategic promotion and partnerships with firms such as Huawei.[3]
This rapid evolution underscores an increasingly important dimension of AI competition between the United States and China, involving a race to promote adoption of their respective national models. DeepSeek’s success reflects growing Chinese momentum across Africa, a trend that may continue to accelerate in 2026. DeepSeek’s ascent also underscores a broader truth: the global diffusion of AI is influenced by accessibility factors, and the next wave of users may come from communities that have historically had limited access to technological progress. The challenge ahead is ensuring that innovation spreads in ways that help narrow divides rather than deepen them.
Another AI system designed to be powerful and engaging ends up illustrating how guardrails routinely fail when development speed and feature races outrun safety controls.
In a post on X, AI chatbot Grok confirmed that it generated an image of young girls in “sexualized attire.”
The potential violation of US laws regarding child sexual abuse material (CSAM) demonstrates the AI chatbot’s apparent lack of guardrails. Or, at least, the guardrails are far from as effective as we’d like them to be.
xAI, the company behind Musk’s chatbot, is reviewing the incident “to prevent future issues,” and the user responsible for the prompt reportedly had their account suspended. Reportedly, in a separate post on X, Grok described the incident as an isolated case and said that urgent fixes were being issued after “lapses in safeguards” were identified.
During the holiday period, we discussed how risks increased when AI developments and features are rushed out the door without adequate safety testing. We keep pushing the limits of what AI can do faster than we can make it safe. Visual models that can sexualize minors are precisely the kind of deployment that should never go live without rigorous abuse testing.
So, while on one hand we see geo-blocking due to national and state content restrictions, the AI linked to one of the most popular social media platforms failed to block content that many would consider far more serious than what lawmakers are currently trying to regulate. In effect, centralized age‑verification databases become breach targets while still failing to prevent AI tools from generating abusive material.
Women have also reported being targeted by Grok’s image-generation features. One X user tweeted:
“Literally woke up to so many comments asking Grok to put me in a thong / bikini and the results having so many bookmarks. Even worse I went onto the Grok page and saw slimy disgusting lowlifes doing that to pictures of CHILDREN. Genuinely disgusting.”
We can only imagine the devastating results when cybercriminals would abuse this type of weakness to defraud or extort parents with fabricated explicit content of their young ones. Tools for inserting real faces into AI-generated content are already widely available, and current safeguards appear unable to reliably prevent abuse.
Tips
This incident is yet another compelling reason to reduce your digital footprint. Think carefully before posting photos of yourself, your children, or other sensitive information on public social media accounts.
Treat everything you see online—images, voices, text—as potentially AI-generated unless they can be independently verified. They’re not only used to sway opinions, but also to solicit money, extract personal information, or create abusive material.
We don’t just report on threats – we help protect your social media
This blog is part of a series where we highlight new or fast-evolving threats in consumer security. This one focuses on how AI is being used to design more realistic campaigns, accelerate social engineering, and how AI agents can be used to target individuals.
Most cybercriminals stick with what works. But once a new method proves effective, it spreads quickly—and new trends and types of campaigns follow.
In 2025, the rapid development of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and its use in cybercrime went hand in hand. In general, AI allows criminals to improve the scale, speed, and personalization of social engineering through realistic text, voice, and video. Victims face not only financial loss, but erosion of trust in digital communication and institutions.
Social engineering
Voice cloning
One of the main areas where AI improved was in the area of voice-cloning, which was immediately picked up by scammers. In the past, they would mostly stick to impersonating friends and relatives. In 2025, they went as far as impersonating senior US officials. The targets were predominantly current or former US federal or state government officials and their contacts.
In the course of these campaigns, cybercriminals used test messages as well as AI-generated voice messages. At the same time, they did not abandon the distressed-family angle. A woman in Florida was tricked into handing over thousands of dollars to a scammer after her daughter’s voice was AI-cloned and used in a scam.
AI agents
Agentic AI is the term used for individualized AI agents designed to carry out tasks autonomously. One such task could be to search for publicly available or stolen information about an individual and use that information to compose a very convincing phishing lure.
These agents could also be used to extort victims by matching stolen data with publicly known email addresses or social media accounts, composing messages and sustaining conversations with people who believe a human attacker has direct access to their Social Security number, physical address, credit card details, and more.
Another use we see frequently is AI-assisted vulnerability discovery. These tools are in use by both attackers and defenders. For example, Google uses a project called Big Sleep, which has found several vulnerabilities in the Chrome browser.
Social media
As mentioned in the section on AI agents, combining data posted on social media with data stolen during breaches is a common tactic. Such freely provided data is also a rich harvesting ground for romance scams, sextortion, and holiday scams.
And then there are the vulnerabilities in public AI platforms such as ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and many others. Researchers and criminals alike are still exploring ways to bypass the safeguards intended to limit misuse.
Prompt injection is the general term for when someone inserts carefully crafted input, in the form of an ordinary conversation or data, to nudge or force an AI into doing something it wasn’t meant to do.
Malware campaigns
In some cases, attackers have used AI platforms to write and spread malware. Researchers have documented campaign where attackers leveraged Claude AI to automate the entire attack lifecycle, from initial system compromise through to ransom note generation, targeting sectors such as government, healthcare, and emergency services.
AI is amplifying the capabilities of both defenders and attackers. Security teams can use it to automate detection, spot patterns faster, and scale protection. Cybercriminals, meanwhile, are using it to sharpen social engineering, discover vulnerabilities more quickly, and build end-to-end campaigns with minimal effort.
Looking toward 2026, the biggest shift may not be technical but psychological. As AI-generated content becomes harder to distinguish from the real thing, verifying voices, messages, and identities will matter more than ever.
We don’t just report on threats—we remove them
Cybersecurity risks should never spread beyond a headline. Keep threats off your devices by downloading Malwarebytes today.
This blog is part of a series where we highlight new or fast-evolving threats in the consumer security landscape. This one looks at how the rapid rise of Artificial Intelligence (AI) is putting users at risk.
In 2025 we saw an ever-accelerating race between AI providers to push out new features. We also saw manufacturers bolt AI onto products simply because it sounded exciting. In many cases, it really shouldn’t have.
Agentic browsers
Agentic or AI browsers that can act autonomously to execute tasks introduced a new set of vulnerabilities—especially to prompt injection attacks. With great AI power comes great responsibility, and risk. If you’re thinking about using an AI browser, it’s worth slowing down and considering the security and privacy implications first. Even experienced AI providers like OpenAI (the makers of ChatGPT) were unable to keep their agentic browser Atlas secure. By pasting a specially crafted link into the Omnibox, attackers were able to trick Atlas into treating a URL input as a trusted command.
Mimicry
The popularity of AI chatbots created the perfect opportunity for scammers to distribute malicious apps. Even if the AI engine itself worked perfectly, attackers have another way in: fake interfaces. According to BleepingComputer, scammers are already creating spoofed AI sidebars that look identical to real ones from browsers like OpenAI’s Atlas and Perplexity’s Comet. These fake sidebars mimic the real interface, making them almost impossible to spot.
Misconfiguration
And then there’s this special category of using AI in products because it sounds cooler with AI or you can ask for more money from buyers.
Toys
We saw a plush teddy bear promising “warmth, fun, and a little extra curiosity” that was taken off the market after researcher found its built-in AI responding with sexual content and advice about weapons. Conversations escalated from innocent to sexual within minutes. The bear didn’t just respond to explicit prompts, which would have been more or less understandable. Researchers said it introduced graphic sexual concepts on its own, including BDSM-related topics, explained “knots for beginners,” and referenced roleplay scenarios involving children and adults.
Misinterpretation
Sometimes we rely on AI systems too much and forget that they hallucinate. As in the case where a school’s AI system mistook a boy’s empty Doritos bag for a gun and triggered a full-blown police response. Multiple police cars arrived with officers drawing their weapons, all because of a false alarm.
Data breaches
Alongside all this comes a surge in privacy concerns. Some issues stem from the data used to train AI models; others come from mishandled chat logs. Two AI companion apps recently exposed private conversations because users weren’t clearly warned that certain settings would result in their conversations becoming searchable or result in targeted advertising.
So, what should we do?
We’ve said it before and we’ll probably say it again: We keep pushing the limits of what AI can do faster than we can make it safe. As long as we keep chasing the newest features, companies will keep releasing new integrations, whether they’re safe or not.
As consumers, the best thing we can do is stay informed about new developments and the risks that come with them. Ask yourself: Do I really need this? What am I trusting AI with? What’s the potential downside? Sometimes it’s worth doing things the slower, safer way.
We don’t just report on privacy—we offer you the option to use it.
Privacy risks should never spread beyond a headline. Keep your online privacy yours by using Malwarebytes Privacy VPN.
The outgoing year of 2025 has significantly transformed our access to the Web and the ways we navigate it. Radical new laws, the rise of AI assistants, and websites scrambling to block AI bots are reshaping the internet right before our eyes. So what do you need to know about these changes, and what skills and habits should you bring with you into 2026? As is our tradition, we’re framing this as eight New Year’s resolutions. What are we pledging for 2026?…
Get to know your local laws
Last year was a bumper crop for legislation that seriously changed the rules of the internet for everyday users. Lawmakers around the world have been busy:
Applying pressure through blocks and lawsuits against platforms that wouldn’t comply with existing child protection laws — with Roblox finding itself in a particularly bright spotlight
Your best bet is to get news from sites that report calmly and without sensationalism, and to review legal experts’ commentaries. You need to understand what obligations fall on you, and, if you have underage children — what changes for them.
You might face difficult conversations with your kids about new rules for using social media or games. It’s crucial that teenage rebellion doesn’t lead to dangerous mistakes such as installing malware disguised as a “restriction-bypassing mod”, or migrating to small, unmoderated social networks. Safeguarding the younger generation requires reliable protection on their computers and smartphones, alongside parental control tools.
But it’s not just about simple compliance with laws. You’ll almost certainly encounter negative side effects that lawmakers didn’t anticipate.
Master new methods of securing access
Some websites choose to geoblock certain countries entirely to avoid the complexities of complying with regional regulations. If you’re certain your local laws allow access to the content, you can bypass these geoblocks by using a VPN. You need to select a server in a country where the site is accessible.
It’s important to choose a service that doesn’t just offer servers in the right locations, but actually enhances your privacy — as many free VPNs can effectively compromise it. We recommend Kaspersky VPN Secure Connection.
Brace for document leaks
While age verification can be implemented in different ways, it often involves websites using a third-party verification service. On your first login attempt, you’ll be redirected to a separate site to complete one of several checks: take a photo of your ID or driver’s license, use a bank card, or nod and smile for a video, and so on.
The mere idea of presenting a passport to access adult websites is deeply unpopular with many people on principle. But beyond that, there’s a serious risk of data leaks. These incidents are already a reality: data breaches have impacted a contractor used to verify Discord users, as well as service providers for TikTok and Uber. The more websites that require this verification, the higher the risk of a leak becomes.
So what can you do?
Prioritize services that don’t require document uploads. Instead, look for those utilizing alternative age verification methods such as a micro-transaction charge to a payment card, confirmation through your bank or another trusted external provider, or behavioral/biometric analysis.
Pick the least sensitive and easiest-to-replace document you have, and use only that one for all verifications. “Least sensitive” in this case means containing minimal personal data, and not referencing other primary identifiers like a national ID number.
Use a separate, dedicated email address and phone number in combination with that document. For the sites and services that don’t verify your identity, use completely different contact details. This makes it much harder for your data to be easily pieced together from different leaks.
Learn scammers’ new playbook
It’s highly likely that under the guise of “age verification”, scammers will begin phishing for personal and payment data, and pushing malware onto visitors. After all, it’s very tempting to simply copy and paste some text on your computer instead of uploading a photo of your passport. Currently, ClickFix attacks are mostly disguised as CAPTCHA checks, but age verification is the logical next step for these schemes. How to lower these risks?
Carefully check any websites that require verification. Do not complete the verification if you’ve already done it for that service before, or if you landed on the verification page via a link from a messaging app, search engine, or ad.
Never download apps or copy and paste text for verification. All legitimate services operate within the browser window, though sometimes desktop users are asked to switch to a smartphone to complete the check.
Analyze and be suspicious of any situation that requires entering a code received via a messaging app or SMS to access a website or confirm an action. This is often a scheme to hijack your messaging account or another critical service.
Even if you’re not a fan of AI, you’ll find it hard to avoid: it’s literally being shoved into each everyday service: Android, Chrome, MS Office, Windows, iOS, Creative Cloud… the list is endless. As with fast food, television, TikTok, and other easily accessible conveniences, the key is striking a balance between the healthy use of these assistants and developing an addiction.
Identify the areas where your mental sharpness and personal growth matter most to you. A person who doesn’t run regularly lowers their fitness level. Someone who always uses GPS navigation gets worse at reading paper maps. Wherever you value the work of your mind, offloading it to AI is a path to losing your edge. Maintain a balance: regularly do that mental work yourself — even if AI can do it well — from translating text to looking up info on Wikipedia. You don’t have to do it all the time, but remember to do it at least some of the time. For a more radical approach, you can also disable AI services wherever possible.
Know where the cost of a mistake is high. Despite developers’ best efforts, AI can sometimes deliver completely wrong answers with total confidence. These so-called hallucinations are unlikely to be fully eradicated anytime soon. Therefore, for important documents and critical decisions, either avoid using AI entirely, or scrutinize its output with extreme care. Check every number, every comma.
In other areas, feel free to experiment with AI. But even for seemingly harmless uses, remember that mistakes and hallucinations are a real possibility.
How to lower the risk of leaks. The more you use AI, the more of your information goes to the service provider. Whenever possible, prioritize AI features that run entirely on your device. This category includes things like the protection against fraudulent sites in Chrome, text translation in Firefox, the rewriting assistant in iOS, and so on. You can even run a full-fledged chatbot locally on your own computer.
AI agents need close supervision. The agentic capabilities of AI — where it doesn’t just suggest but actively does work for you — are especially risky. Thoroughly research the risks in this area before trusting an agent with online shopping or booking a vacation. And use modes where the assistant asks for your confirmation before entering personal data — let alone buying anything.
Audit your subscriptions and plans
The economics of the internet is shifting right before our eyes. The AI arms race is driving up the cost of components and computing power, tariffs and geopolitical conflicts are disrupting supply chains, and baking AI features into familiar products sometimes comes with a price hike. Practically any online service can get more expensive overnight — sometimes by double-digit percentages. Some providers are taking a different route, moving away from a fixed monthly fee to a pay-per-use model for things like songs downloaded or images generated.
To avoid nasty surprises when you check your bank statement, make it a habit to review the terms of all your paid subscriptions at least three or four times a year. You might find that a service has updated its plans and that you need to downgrade to a simpler one. Or a service might have quietly signed you up for an extra feature you’re not even aware of — and you need to disable it. Some services might be better switched to a free tier or canceled altogether. Financial literacy is becoming a must-have skill for managing your digital spending.
To get a complete picture of your subscriptions and truly understand how much you’re spending on digital services each month or year, it’s best to track them all in one place. A simple Excel or Google Docs spreadsheet works, but a dedicated app like SubsCrab is more convenient. It sends reminders for upcoming payments, shows all your spending month-by-month, and can even help you find better deals on the same or similar services.
Prioritize the longevity of your tech
The allure of powerful new processors, cameras, and AI features might tempt you to buy a new smartphone or laptop in 2026, but planning for making it last for several years should be a priority. There are a few reasons…
First, the pace of meaningful new features has slowed, and the urge to upgrade frequently has diminished for many. Second, gadget prices have risen significantly due to more expensive chips, labor, and shipping — making major purchases harder to justify. Furthermore, regulations like those in the EU now require easily replaceable batteries in new devices, meaning the part that wears out the fastest in a phone will be simpler and cheaper to swap out yourself.
So, what does it take to make sure your smartphone or laptop reliably lasts several years?
Physical protection. Use cases, screen protectors, and maybe even a waterproof pouch.
Proper storage. Avoid extreme temperatures, don’t leave it baking in direct sun or freezing overnight in a car at -15°C.
Battery care. Avoid regularly draining it to single-digit percentages.
Regular software updates. This is the trickiest part. Updates are essential for security to protect your phone or laptop from new types of attacks. However, updates can sometimes cause slowdowns, overheating, or battery drain. The prudent approach is to wait about a week after a major OS update, check feedback from users of your exact model, and only install it if the coast seems clear.
Secure your smart home
The smart home is giving way to a new concept: the intelligent home. The idea is that neural networks will help your home make its own decisions about what to do and when, all for your convenience — without needing pre-programmed routines. Thanks to the Matter 1.3 standard, a smart home can now manage not just lights, TVs, and locks, but also kitchen appliances, dryers, and even EV chargers! Even more importantly, we’re seeing a rise in devices where Matter over Thread is the native, primary communication protocol, like the new IKEA KAJPLATS lineup. Matter-powered devices from different vendors can see and communicate with each other. This means you can, say, buy an Apple HomePod as your smart home central hub and connect Philips Hue bulbs, Eve Energy plugs, and IKEA BILRESA switches to it.
All of this means that smart and intelligent homes will become more common — and so will the ways to attack them. We have a detailed article on smart home security, but here are a few key tips relevant in light of the transition to Matter.
Consolidate your devices into a single Matter fabric. Use the minimum number of controllers, for example, one Apple TV + one smartphone. If a TV or another device accessible to many household members acts as a controller, be sure to use password security and other available restrictions for critical functions.
Choose a hub and controller from major manufacturers with a serious commitment to security.
Minimize the number of devices connecting your Matter fabric to the internet. These devices — referred to as Border Routers — must be well-protected from external cyberattacks, for example, by restricting their access at the level of your home internet router.
Regularly audit your home network for any suspicious, unknown devices. In your Matter fabric, this is done via your controller or hub, and in your home network — via your primary router or a feature like Smart Home Monitor in Kaspersky Premium.
Security teams that rely on Microsoft know the power of a deeply integrated security stack. Today, we’re proud to announce an important milestone that further strengthens that ecosystem.
Intezer has been named a top-tier Solutions Partner in the Microsoft AI Cloud Partner Program (MAICPP), a designation reserved for solutions that meet Microsoft’s highest standards for security, architecture, and seamless cloud integration.
This recognition follows a successful Microsoft technical audit and certifies the Intezer Forensic AI SOC platform as trusted, Microsoft-validated software designed to deliver real security outcomes for modern SOC teams.
Join AI SOC Live on January 6th to see how to maximize your Microsoft Security investment with Forensic AI SOC. January 6th | 9am PT | 12pm EST.
Strengthening Microsoft-driven SOCs with Forensic AI
Microsoft security tools generate powerful signals, but signals alone don’t equal outcomes. SOC teams still face alert overload, limited context, and the constant risk that real threats hide in low- or medium-severity alerts.
The Intezer Forensic AI SOC platform was built to solve this problem.
Intezer strengthens the outcomes of Microsoft-driven SOCs by combining agentic AI with automated forensic investigation, enriching Microsoft alerts with deep technical evidence and cross-platform context. The platform investigates alerts from and across:
Microsoft Defender for Endpoint
Microsoft Defender for Identity (Entra ID)
Microsoft Defender for Office 365 and reported phishing
Microsoft Sentinel
Microsoft Defender for Cloud
Non-Microsoft security tools across endpoint, identity, cloud, email, and network environments
Instead of triaging only “high severity” alerts, Intezer investigates every alert with automated querying of Microsoft Sentinel, whenever needed, to enrich alerts, correlate logs, and validate activity. This provides visibility into every incident without manual lookups or switching tools.
How Intezer delivers better SOC outcomes on Microsoft
24/7 AI-powered triage and investigation
Intezer automatically triages and investigates 100% of alerts, including low- and medium-severity alerts that are commonly ignored. By mirroring how expert human analysts investigate incidents, using multiple AI models combined with deterministic forensics, Intezer delivers speed without sacrificing accuracy.
Less than 4% alerts escalated, higher confidence decisions
Across Microsoft and non-Microsoft alerts, fewer than 4% are escalated to human analysts. Each verdict is backed by forensic evidence, reducing noise, eliminating guesswork, and enabling analysts to focus only on what truly matters.
Faster response with native Microsoft actions
Intezer enables automated remediation directly through Microsoft tools, including:
Device isolation via Defender for Endpoint
User lockout through Entra ID
Email quarantine in Defender for Office 365
Interactive response via Microsoft Teams
This tight integration allows teams to move from alert to action in minutes, without switching tools or workflows.
Built to maximize the value of Microsoft security investments
“This designation reflects our commitment to helping organizations get the most out of their Microsoft security investments,” said Itai Tevet, CEO and co-founder of Intezer. “As a top-tier Solutions Partner in the Microsoft AI Cloud Partner Program, we deliver AI-powered, forensic-grade investigations that strengthen the security outcomes of SOC teams using Defender, Sentinel, and the broader Microsoft Security Suite. We help teams move from alerts to clear, confident decisions in minutes.”
Intezer customers can also purchase directly through the Microsoft Azure Marketplace and apply existing Azure credits, simplifying procurement and accelerating time to value.
What the MAICPP designation means for security teams
The Microsoft AI Cloud Partner Program recognizes partners whose solutions are proven to work at scale across the Microsoft Cloud. Achieving top-tier Solutions Partner status signals that Intezer:
Meets Microsoft’s highest standards for security, reliability, and architectural excellence
Integrates deeply and natively across the Microsoft Security Suite
Delivers validated customer impact for organizations operating on Microsoft infrastructure
For customers, this designation provides confidence that Intezer is not just compatible with Microsoft security, but purpose-built to extend and elevate it.
Why this matters now
As SOCs face increasing alert volumes, tighter budgets, and a growing shortage of skilled analysts, automation alone is no longer enough. Security teams need forensic-grade AI that can explain why an alert matters, not just label it.
The MAICPP designation confirms that Intezer delivers exactly that:
Enterprise-grade accuracy
Microsoft-validated integrations
Proven SOC efficiency at scale
For organizations running on Microsoft, Intezer is now officially recognized as a trusted partner to help transform alerts into outcomes.
If 2025 proved anything, it’s that no one wins alone in cybersecurity. AI-driven threats accelerated, and environments grew more complex while enterprises pushed hard for simplicity, integrated protection and security outcomes that deliver measurable results and meaningful value.
In response, we saw our partners around the globe lean into integration, treat AI as a built-in advantage and use the strength of our ecosystem as a force multiplier. The result: What could have been a disruptive year instead became one defined by growth and learning across our partner community.
Now, those lessons are guiding how Palo Alto Networks plans to partner with even greater precision in 2026. We remain a channel-first company that’s all-in on our ecosystem and united with our partners in a shared purpose to protect our customers’ digital future. But we also intend to double down in several areas in the year ahead, and we’re asking our partners to join us in doing the same.
1. Simplifying Security Through Integration
One message from customers that came through loud and clear in 2025 is that complexity is the enemy of resilience. Many enterprises are grappling with tool sprawl – multiple consoles, disconnected policies and overlapping investments that slow down their teams when speed and agility matter most.
The partners who delivered some of the most transformative results for organizations this year were those who chose integration over complexity and collaboration over siloed tools. With a laser focus on simplifying security, they were able to help customers:
Consolidate fragmented point tools onto a unified security platform.
Align visibility across the network, cloud and security operations center (SOC), so teams can respond faster.
Build architectures with zero trust and AI-powered detection at the core.
We saw this simplifying-security trend through integration across our ecosystem. Partners unified cloud security and detection workflows through Cortex® Cloud™ and Cortex. Teams modernized network architectures with tighter integration across our platform. We expect this activity to only accelerate in the coming year as our cloud security offerings continue to evolve.
When we innovate together, customers gain stronger defenses and a faster time-to-value. That’s why Palo Alto Networks has invested so heavily in platformization. When you connect our capabilities across network security, cloud security and security operations (wrapping them with your consulting, delivery and managed services) customers can experience something fundamentally better. With fewer gaps and clearer signals, they can build a security posture that’s built for the speed of modern threats.
In 2026, deep integration will remain a cornerstone of how we partner with precision. We’ll continue aligning our portfolio, programs and joint engagement model, so you can build offerings that reduce complexity for customers and create stronger differentiation for your business.
2. Making AI a Built-in Advantage
At Palo Alto Networks, our approach to AI in cybersecurity is straightforward. We believe AI must be embedded, not bolted on. It has to live in the data, analytics and workflows your teams rely on every day. That’s the thinking behind Precision AI®, and it’s why we built AI capabilities into our platform’s core.
Partners who treated AI as a platform capability rather than a standalone tool delivered some of the strongest outcomes for customers in 2025. They were able to meet customers’ needs and deliver business outcomes in a single, unified approach. They helped organizations:
Detect and respond to threats faster with AI-assisted analytics.
Use automation to streamline change, investigation and response workflows.
Tie AI to tangible outcomes, such as reduced risk, higher productivity and a better user experience.
In 2026, we’ll double down on AI across the platform and invest in the tools, content and enablement you need to bring those capabilities to life. Our focus is on making it easier for you to build AI-powered services that are repeatable and aligned to the outcomes customers expect.
Upcoming program changes reflect that intent. We’ll promote next-generation security as a growth engine and invest in ways that strengthen partner profitability across consulting services, resale, quality delivery, technical support and managed security services.
3. Ensuring Our Ecosystem Can Be a Growth Engine for Everyone
As AI raised the bar for both attackers and defenders in 2025, the partners who leaned into platformization and outcome-driven services were the ones who helped customers stay ahead of the curve. Those successes are now shaping how we strengthen and scale the partner ecosystem in 2026.
Our ecosystem isn’t just a route to market; it’s intended to be an economic engine for everyone involved. This year, many partners grew their business by building practices around our platform and aligning their services with where customers needed the most support: strategy, implementation, optimization, ongoing operations. We saw especially strong momentum from partners’ expansions:
Consulting and advisory services around zero trust and AI-driven transformation.
Resale opportunities centered on platform consolidation and next-generation security.
Quality delivery and technical support that keep deployments reliable and current.
Managed security services that give customers 24/7 protection and expert oversight.
These achievements reflect the value exchange at the heart of our ecosystem. Palo Alto Networks invests in platformization, AI and enablement, while our partners bring delivery expertise, regional insight and service innovation. Together, we create outcomes neither of us could deliver alone.
In 2026, we plan to build on that momentum and drive even greater partner profitability. Program evolutions will focus on growth across the full lifecycle, from initial design and implementation to long-term operation and optimization. We’re also expanding collaboration with our technology alliances to build new joint offerings and solution plays that the ecosystem can take to market together.
When we combine our platform, your expertise and the capabilities of our Alliance partners, then customers gain more paths to adopt next-generation security with confidence, and you gain more opportunities to develop differentiated, high-value practices.
Keeping Customers at the Center
At the heart of every partner collaboration is the customer, of course. Everything we build, integrate and advance together starts and ends with protecting them. This year, ecosystem alignment delivered measurable impact for our customers across industries. When partners lead with integrated solutions anchored in our platform, organizations saw visible improvements:
Faster deployment of secure solutions.
Reduced complexity with unified visibility.
Greater confidence in defending against today’s AI-driven threats.
We saw this firsthand in joint wins across cloud security transformations, zero trust modernization and AI-assisted threat detection. When our ecosystem moves together, customers can move faster, operate more securely and achieve meaningful outcomes. Customer success is the foundation of everything we do as a partner-led organization, and it will remain our North Star in 2026.
Partnering with Precision in 2026 and Beyond
What we learned and achieved together in 2025 points us toward a clear focus for 2026 to advance ecosystem-led innovation, so we can deliver outcomes that matter most to our customers.
With that mission in mind, we will focus on the following four priorities:
Deeper Integration – Expanding API partnerships and strengthening interoperability across the platform.
Co-Innovation – Enabling partners to build solutions tailored to industry needs and use cases.
Empowered Enablement – Investing in learning, automation and AI capabilities that fuel differentiated, profitable services.
Simplified Engagement – Streamlining programs and tools, so that partnering with us is faster and more rewarding.
These priorities highlight the real strength of our ecosystem: How platformization, AI and partner expertise come together to enable what we could not build alone.
Finally, to our partners and customers, thank you. Your trust, collaboration and commitment push us to innovate boldly and continuously. As we enter the new year, I’m excited about what we’ll build together. When we align our AI-powered platform, our partner programs and your expertise in delivery, services and managed security, we can deliver something far greater than a set of solutions.
We’re a powerful team that’s not just defending against what’s next; we’re defining the future of cybersecurity. And together, we’re unstoppable.
Partners, join us in shaping the next chapter of secure, AI-powered innovations. Connect with your Channel Business Manager to align on 2026 opportunities, upcoming program updates and ways we can elevate customer outcomes together. Visit the partner portal to learn more.
Key Takeaways
Integration beats complexity. Unifying technology, data and expertise drove the strongest outcomes in 2025, helping partners reduce risk and accelerate time-to-value for customers.
AI is a built-in advantage. By tapping into AI embedded across our cybersecurity platform, partners can address security and business outcomes simultaneously and deliver repeatable, profitable, AI-powered services.
The partner ecosystem is a growth engine, and together, we’re unstoppable.
Our 2026 priorities focus on deeper integration, coinnovation, empowered enablement and simplified engagement that drive partner profitability and stronger customer outcomes.
There’s a clear trend emerging with many organizations transitioning from legacy SIEMs to Google SecOps. While the Google SIEM platform is powerful, in our experience working with enterprise clients, that power only reveals itself when security leaders make three early decisions correctly:
Detection strategy: Whether to migrate existing rules or start fresh with a green-field approach.
Data onboarding: How to scale ingestion across multi-cloud environments without breaking pipelines.
Operating model: Building workflows that prevent “alert debt” from piling up on day one.
The strategic message is clear. Treat SIEM detection management with the same diligence you treat core security architecture, and augment your analysts with AI-powered triage so your humans can focus on higher-order investigations.
Here’s a practical checklist for discovery, migration, and operational success, designed for CISOs and SOC leaders evaluating a move to Google SecOps.
The tl;dr version of the Google SIEM migration checklist
Phase
Key focus
Pre-Migration
Inventory, pain-point assessment, business justification
Migration
Tool selection, data ingestion, rule/dashboard migration, Integration, governance & risk
Post-Migration
Measurement of success, continuous improvement, cost optimisation, governance & reporting
Full Google SecOps migration checklist
Let’s dive into the details for each phase of the migration process.
Pre-migration checklist: Establishing the baseline
Inventory current environment
Catalogue all data sources feeding Splunk: log types, volumes (GB/day), retention policies, on-prem vs cloud vs multi-cloud.
Map all current detections, dashboards, reports, playbooks, SOAR workflows.
Identify any compliance/regulatory retention obligations (audit logs, legal hold).
Establish current licensing costs, infrastructure (forwarders, indexers), staffing.
Assess SIEM performance & pain points
Are you seeing cost escalation vs benefit (slower detection, high false positives, low automation)?
Is the SIEM struggling with data volume growth, scalability, multi-cloud telemetry?
Are SOC analysts spending more time on infrastructure/configuration than investigations?
Are you able to integrate newer requirements (cloud workloads, containers, IoT/OT, multi-cloud) effectively? This 451 Research report indicates many orgs run multiple SIEMs due to tool sprawl.
Define business & security objectives
What do you hope to achieve? E.g., faster detection/response, lower cost, improved coverages, cloud alignment.
What are the key metrics: mean time to detect (MTTD), mean time to respond (MTTR), cost-per-alert, false positive rate, regulatory coverage, etc.
What is your target SOC maturity in e.g., 12-24 months? Are you planning a cloud-first strategy, heavier automation/AI, less on-prem infrastructure?
Build the migration justification
Prepare a comparative TCO/ROI: legacy SIEM vs cloud-native. Google SecOps materials claim e.g., “ingest and analyse your data at Google speed and scale” and highlight cost benefit.
Understand what it will cost to migrate: re-write detections, dashboards, data flows, training, potential downtime.
Present risk assessment: What happens if you don’t migrate (risk of obsolete tool, scaling failure, cost spirals)? The “Great SIEM Migration” guide argues that legacy tools may become “dinosaurs”.
Migration-phase checklist: Executing the transition
Select migration path & vendor/partner support
Decide: full rip & replace vs phased migration vs augmentation (run new platform in parallel).
Evaluate tooling for data-migration, rule conversion, playbook migration.
Data ingestion, normalization & compatibility
Ensure: all of your log types/sources in Splunk are supported by the new platform. Google SecOps supports ingestion of Splunk CIM logs.
Plan for data mapping: Splunk field names, dashboards, custom fields → new schema.
Address historic data: Will you migrate archives? Will you keep Splunk as store-only? Community posts warn that mapping old archives can be complex.
Validate performance: test ingestion, query latency, retention policies on the new platform.
Detection rules, dashboards, SOAR workflows
Catalogue existing detection rules, dashboards, SOAR playbooks in Splunk.
Determine which can be reused, which need rewriting. Ensure parity: detection coverage, mapping to MITRE ATT&CK, business use-cases. Splunk claims strong out-of-box detection library.
Build and test new rules/playbooks in Google SecOps; validate they meet or exceed current performance (MTTD, MTTR, false positives).
Ensure analyst training and new workflows are adopted: new UI, new query language, new incident-investigation flows (Google SecOps offers “Gemini in security operations” natural-language assistant).
Integration & ecosystem fit
Ensure that Google SecOps integrates with your existing tool-stack (EDR, identity, network, cloud logs, SOAR, threat intel). Google advertises 300+ SOAR integrations.
Confirm multi-cloud/on-prem data ingestion: check vendor statements.
Validate APIs, custom connectors, forwarder architecture. Splunk vs Google SecOps comparison note: Splunk emphasizes hybrid flexibility.
Governance, compliance & retention
Check how historic data will be retained, archived, accessed, both for compliance (audits/regulators) and investigations.
Communicate to stakeholders: SOC analysts, business units, auditors. Ensure training and change-management.
Set benchmarks and metrics: Time to detect/resolve in new platform vs old; cost per alert; staff utilisation; alert volumes; false positives.
Post-migration checklist: Optimizing & sustaining value
Validate outcomes & measure success
Measure MTTD, MTTR, alert volumes, analyst productivity pre- and post-migration.
Compare actual cost savings vs business case.
Assess detection coverage: Are all critical use-cases still covered? Are any gaps emerging?
Run periodic health checks (some vendors like CardinalOps offer detection-rule health monitoring with MITRE ATT&CK coverage for Google SecOps).
Continuous improvement & SOC maturity evolution
SOC maturity doesn’t stop at migration. Use freed-up resources to focus on advanced use-cases (threat hunting, proactive detection, automation, investigations).
Ensure audit/compliance reports reflect the new tooling (document changes, validate controls).
Set up periodic reviews of tool performance, vendor roadmap, SOC maturity.
Final thoughts
Migrating to Google SecOps isn’t a simple platform swap, it’s a redesign of how your SOC operates. The upside: cost efficiency, scale, and automation can be immediate. The risks: migration complexity, content gaps, and operational disruption are real and must be managed deliberately.
As a CISO or SOC leader, treat this as a transformation program. Use the table and/or the full Checklist above to drive decisions; follow a strategic landing plan to sequence work; and anchor on the three non-negotiables outlined above:
A clear detection strategy (migrate only if the value is there; rebuild the rest in YARA-L),
Data onboarding at scale with a parser matrix and cost guardrails, and
An operating model that prevents alert debt from day one through automation and measurable KPIs.
If you want help getting there faster, we can provide a SIEM jumpstart (curated + bespoke YARA-L rules, MITRE gap analysis and coverage, detection reviews, continuous improvement with Intezer engineers), a parser/ingestion plan for multi-cloud, and of course, Intezer Forensic AI SOC’s triage to meet on day-one, 100% alert coverage with full auditability so your analysts focus on the few cases that truly need their context and expertise.
Every CIO and CISO we speak with describes the same paradox: AI is now central to their transformation agenda, yet the fastest way to derail that agenda is to lose control of AI. As generative AI, agentic systems and embedded AI features spread across the enterprise, leaders are no longer asking if they need AI security; they’re asking what kind of AI security strategy will actually scale.
Gartner® has published two recent reports that validate this reality and outline the strategic direction enterprises must take to secure their AI:
Point products can plug individual gaps, but they can’t keep up with the speed, complexity and interconnected nature of AI adoption. And more importantly, they struggle to deliver the trust, consistency or scale AI transformation requires.
Many organizations are already experiencing AI adoption outpacing traditional security tools. Security teams are under pressure on three fronts:
Risk – Shadow AI, unmanaged agents and custom LLMs create new pathways for data loss, intellectual property exposure and model misuse.
Cost – Each new AI use case brings yet another tool, driving up license, integration and operations costs.
Complexity – Fragmented controls across network, data, identity and application stacks create blind spots exactly where AI is moving fastest.
From a CIO or CISO’s perspective, this isn’t just a technical concern but the fault line beneath their entire AI agenda. CIOs are under pressure to deliver productivity gains, cost efficiencies and new AI-powered capabilities faster than ever before.
CISOs, on the other hand, see a parallel reality: custom-built AI applications that may be insecure by default, agents that can act unpredictably, and a constant risk that company secrets or customer data could leak into third-party GenAI tools.
If AI moves forward without security, the enterprise is exposed. If AI slows down because security can’t keep up, the business misses its transformation goals. This is why AI security isn’t a feature; it’s the determining factor in whether AI becomes a competitive advantage or a strategic setback.
Gartner recommends the path forward as “an integrated modular AI security platform (AISP) with a common UI, data model, content inspection engine and consistent policy enforcement.”
Gartner further recommends prioritizing investments in two phases.
Phase 1
Start with AI usage control to secure the consumption of third-party AI services.
Phase 2
Expand into AI application protection to securely develop and run AI applications.
Phase 1: Securing Generative AI Usage Is the “Right Now” Challenge
Before enterprises can secure how AI is developed, they must first understand how it is already being used across the organization. The earliest risks often emerge not from the AI-enabled apps built in-house, but from the external generative AI tools and copilots employees adopt, and often without the IT teams’ knowledge.
That’s why we think the report identifies AI usage control as phase one and why we recommend IT leaders start with these immediate questions to assess their organization’s AI usage.
Where is AI actually being used in my organization?
Which tools, copilots and agents are in play, and on what data?
How do I enable productivity without losing control?
Phase 2: Securing AI Development Early Into the AI Lifecycle
Once public generative AI use is understood, the harder challenge emerges: Securing the AI apps and tools that your organization creates for itself. As models, agents and pipelines move into production, the questions shift from visibility to integrity, safety and scale.
Key questions that organizations must answer in phase two include:
What AI applications, models and agents are my teams building, and where do they live?
How do I manage the integrity, safety and compliance of AI apps before they reach production?
How do I protect models and AI applications from prompt injection, misuse or agentic threats?
How do I scale AI innovation without creating security bottlenecks for developers?
Palo Alto Networks Delivers the AI Security Platform
Although organizations can separate the work around securing AI usage and AI development, they are not two separate problems. The same organization that needs visibility into employees using public GenAI apps also needs to protect the AI applications and agents they’ve built as they move into production. A platform approach is what allows shared policies, shared guardrails and shared context across both sides of the AI usage and development equation.
That is exactly the philosophy behind our Secure AI by Design approach:
Secure how GenAI is used with Prisma® Browser and Prisma SASE to discover AI tools in use, govern access and prevent sensitive data from flowing into public models, all while keeping users productive with GenAI and enterprise copilots.
Secure how AIis built with capabilities of Prisma AIRS, such as model and agent security, AI security posture management, runtime protection, automated testing with AI Red Teaming, as well as coverage for agentic protocols, like MCP, securing custom AI applications, agents and pipelines.
We believe we are the AI Security Platform to beat because:
Palo Alto Networks product portfolio across network, edge, cloud and data provides a strong foundation for AI usage visibility and control.
The acquisition of Protect AI integrated industry-leading AI talent and products resulting in the recently announced Prisma AIRS 2.0, which delivers comprehensive end-to-end AI security, seamlessly connecting deep AI agent and model inspection in development with real-time agent defense at production runtime. The platform, continuously validated by autonomous AI red teaming, secures all interactions between AI models, agents, data and users. This gives enterprises the confidence to discover, assess and protect their entire AI ecosystem, accelerating secure innovation.
Complementing the platform, Unit 42®’s deep expertise and Huntr’s bug bounty program, provide security thought leadership that directly improves product effectiveness and threat intelligence. These programs help us continuously uncover new attack patterns, misconfigurations and supply chain risks unique to AI systems, as well as feed those insights directly back into the product roadmap.
Our large installed base and distribution channels create a flywheel for AI security platform adoption and learning from our customers and partners.
We also believe that underneath the technical requirements is a deeper truth: CIOs and CISOs want to move fast on AI, but they only feel safe doing so with a partner who has the scale, signal and staying power. This is where our breadth, research depth and ecosystem matter.
Leading Responsibly Means Listening, Innovating and Evolving
Being early is an advantage, but staying ahead requires humility and continuous learning. Leading means seeing what comes next, and Gartner’s insights accelerate our own roadmap as we continue to evolve.
Simplifying the Experience: We are integrating capabilities across Prisma AIRS, Prisma SASE and Prisma Browser to make AI security easier to adopt, operate and scale through Strata Cloud Manager as the single entry point.
Going Deeper into the AI Engineering Pipeline: We recognize that securing AI must start early in the developing environment and ML pipeline, not just at runtime. Our integrations with AI development tools and code repositories will continue to expand.
Keeping Pace with a Fast-Moving Market: We are investing in open standards, partnerships and research, so our customers don’t have to chase every point solution that appears. Palo Alto Networks is also a contributing member to OWASP Standards and Threat analysis to help create an industry standard on AI security.
Working Along Native AI Controls:Cloud providers and AI platforms are adding their own security features. We aim to complement, not replace, those controls, providing unified visibility, advanced protection and consistent policies across a fragmented AI landscape.
For us, being “the company to beat” is not a finish line. It’s a responsibility to listen carefully to customers, adapt as AI evolves, and keep delivering practical, integrated outcomes rather than isolated features.
In the end, the real race isn’t about features; it’s about who helps enterprises accelerate transformation safely, reduce risk and compete better with AI they can trust.
Disclaimer: Gartner does not endorse any company, vendor, product or service depicted in its publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s business and technology insights organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this publication, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.
Gartner, AI Vendor Race: Palo Alto Networks is the Company to Beat in AI Security Platforms, By Mark Wah, Neil MacDonald, Marissa Schmidt, Dennis Xu, Evan Zeng, 8 December 2025.
Gartner, GMs: Win the AI Security Battle With an AI Security Platform, By Neil MacDonald, Tarun Rohilla, 6 October 2025.
GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and is used herein with permission. All rights reserved.
Since opening our first Canadian office in Toronto in 1985, Microsoft has played an important role in every chapter of Canada’s digital story, long before cloud and AI were household words. That history matters. Over four decades, our company and our thousands of employees have grown alongside Canada. We’ve developed a deep appreciation for this nation’s culture, values, needs, and important role in the world.
Today we are announcing the most important commitment in Microsoft Canada’s history. We’re adding to our investments—with a total of $19 billion CAD between 2023 and 2027, including more than $7.5 billion CAD in the next two years. We’re building new digital and AI infrastructure needed for the nation’s growth and prosperity, with new capacity beginning to come online in the second half of 2026. Equally important, we’re launching a new five-point plan to promote and protect Canada’s digital sovereignty. And we’re combining this with ongoing and new work to invest in Canada’s people, ensuring they have access to the skills needed to succeed in an AI era.
This builds upon Microsoft’s longstanding and deep relationship with the Canadian people. With more than 5,300 employees across 11 cities nationwide, including Toronto, Vancouver, Montreal, Calgary, Edmonton, Ottawa, and Quebec City, we have employees in every region to bring talent closer to the communities we serve.
Beyond our own team, based on third party estimates, we’re fueling the broader tech ecosystem with more than 17,000 companies that are Microsoft partners in Canada generating between $33B CAD and $41B CAD in annual revenue. Based on this partnership model, Microsoft helps support 426,000 jobs across Canada, including close to 300,000 people who build solutions on Microsoft platforms or provide goods and services for these efforts. As we expand our AI and cloud footprint, these partnerships are helping Canadian organizations to modernize and compete globally.
Our commitment also extends beyond business. In 2024 alone, we donated $219M CAD in grants, employee giving, and technology services to Canadian non-profits and charities.
At its core, our commitment to Canada centres on three things: technology, trust, and talent.
Technology: Building the Backbone of Canada’s Digital Future
Canada’s AI transformation is accelerating. According to Microsoft’s AI Diffusion Leaderboard, Canada ranks 14th globally in AI adoption, with usage now topping a third of the population. Developer contributions are growing too with Canada ranking 14th worldwide in GitHub AI contributors.
This momentum is clear. Canada is a leader not just in AI research, but in putting AI to good use. But sustaining this momentum requires more than enthusiasm. It demands advanced AI infrastructure, sovereign safeguards, world-class cybersecurity, and a skilled workforce to keep pace with innovation. That’s why Microsoft is investing to create a secure, sustainable, and scalable backbone for AI adoption, empowering Canada to lead confidently in the AI era.
Our investment expands our Azure Canada Central and Canada East datacentre regions, delivering sustainable, secure, and scalable cloud and AI capabilities. These datacentres will power everything from modernized public services to advanced AI innovation—responsibly and within Canadian borders.
Every facility and datacentre we build in Canada reflects Microsoft’s global commitment to sustainability. We’re designing our facilities to be energy-efficient, powered increasingly by renewable energy, and optimized for water conservation through advanced cooling technologies. These steps align with our pledge to be carbon negative, water positive, and zero waste by 2030, ensuring that as we expand our AI and cloud footprint, we do so responsibly—minimizing environmental impact while supporting Canada’s clean energy goals.
Since early 2023, these investments have already launched major infrastructure projects, created thousands of jobs, and partnered with Canadian innovators to drive sustainability and economic growth. These datacentres also translate into thousands of construction and permanent engineering and technology jobs, partnerships with Canadian digital innovators, and a surge in local economic opportunity.
Our infrastructure expansion has helped transform and develop new industries—from retail and finance to cleantech and quantum computing. Firms like Canadian Tire, Manulife, BMO, and Gay Lea Foods are embracing AI to transform their businesses, and their stories are a testament to Canada’s leadership in digital adoption.
To help achieve our 2030 sustainability goals, Microsoft is also investing in Canadian cleantech innovation. Canada is recognized as a global leader in cleantech and carbon removal technologies, and we are proud to collaborate with outstanding Canadian companies like Eavor, Cyclic Materials, Arca, Deep Sky, and Carbon Engineering (via 1PointFive).
Trust: A Five-Point Plan to Protect Canada’s Digital Sovereignty
As important as our investment in AI infrastructure is the new company-wide initiative we are launching to protect Canada’s digital sovereignty. This builds on technology and expertise across Microsoft and is based on a five-part plan to defend Canada’s cybersecurity, keep Canadian data on Canadian soil, strengthen privacy protection, support leading local AI developers, and ensure the continuity of cloud and AI services.
Defending Canada’s cybersecurity
As we enter the second quarter of the 21st century, the protection of digital sovereignty starts with the protection of cybersecurity. Reflecting Microsoft’s long-term presence in Canada, we appreciate how much has changed since the century began. During the first quarter of the century, Canada’s population grew by more than 28 percent and its GDP in real terms grew by more than 55 percent. Changing geopolitics and navigation in the Arctic Ocean have put Canada in a more important global position than ever.
Canada’s growth and importance have made the country a bigger cybersecurity target.
Microsoft has long prioritized the protection of Canadian cybersecurity. With unmatched threat intelligence capabilities based on 100 trillion signals from around the world every day, we’ve seen increasing international targeting of Canadian digital assets, especially from China, Russia, North Korea, and countries across south Asia and the Middle East. This has included influence operations in advance of elections and digital espionage focused on government agencies.
Even more significant, Canada’s diverse and robust economy has become a target of sophisticated international ransomware attacks. Organized criminal groups—some with nation state sponsorship—are targeting every sector of the economy and the public, and they are starting to rely on even more sophisticated technology and techniques, including AI. Our assessment is that in 2025 more than half of cyberattacks against Canada with known motives have been based on financial objectives, and 80 percent of them have involved efforts to exfiltrate data. Almost 20 percent have targeted the healthcare and education sectors, which creates more widespread threats to the public.
To strengthen our protection of Canada’s cybersecurity, we are launching today in Ottawa a dedicated Threat Intelligence Hub. This Hub will house Microsoft subject matter experts in threat intelligence, threat protection research, and applied AI security research. They will have access to Microsoft threat intelligence data and assets from around the world, so they can work closely with the Government of Canada and law enforcement partners to track and interdict nation state actors and organized crime.
In recent months, our team in Canada has been working to thwart China-based threat actors and has been sharing intelligence related to North Korean IT workers using stolen or fake identities to secure jobs with technology companies in Canada. We are dedicated to making this cybersecurity protection even stronger going forward.
Keeping Canadian Data on Canadian Soil
We also recognize the importance of ensuring that our Canadian customers can keep their local data on Canadian soil. This is why we embarked a decade ago, in close consultation with national leaders, to build and open our first two Canadian datacentres to provide local data residency in Toronto and Quebec City. We have steadily expanded our local services each year since. In 2026, we will take three new steps to keep Canadian data on Canadian soil.
First, we will strengthen sovereign controls and expand our data residency commitments by offering in-country data processing for Copilot interactions.
Second, we will expand our Azure Local offering in Canada to enable the extension of Azure capabilities to customer-owned environments such as private cloud and on-premises infrastructure.
And third, we will launch Sovereign AI Landing Zone (SAIL) in Canada. This is an open-source AI Landing Zone whose code will be hosted publicly on GitHub, and which will provide a secure foundation for deploying AI solutions within Canada’s borders, so organizations can build, scale, and innovate while maintaining the highest standards of privacy and compliance.
Protecting Canadian privacy
We recognize that privacy is a cornerstone of digital trust. We have long protected the digital privacy of people across Canada. As we look to 2026, we will build on this strong foundation with new technical capabilities and legal measures.
Next year, Microsoft will bring the latest confidential computing capabilities to our Canadian datacentre regions. Confidential computing in Azure enables organizations to keep data encrypted and isolated, even while in use, helping meet stringent digital sovereignty requirements. Azure Key Vault will also be available to Canadian customers, supporting external key management and allowing encryption keys to remain under customer control, whether stored on-premises or with a trusted third-party Hardware Security Module (HSM).
We will couple these technical measures with expanded contractual protection. We are codifying our promise to protect our Canadian customers’ data with a contractual commitment, in which we agree to challenge any government demand for Canadian government or commercial customer data where we have a legal basis for doing so.
Supporting Canada’s AI developers
Canada’s growing AI and digital ecosystem also requires protection and support for the nation’s leading AI developers. We have expanded this work in 2025 and will continue to prioritize these efforts in the year ahead.
Our work with Cohere exemplifies this commitment: we are welcoming Cohere into the Microsoft Foundry’s first-party model lineup, making their advanced language models—Command A, Embed 4, and Rerank—accessible on Azure. This will amplify Canadian innovation on a global stage. This partnership is built on more than technology; it is grounded in trust and shared values, with initiatives to help Cohere scale across Canada and worldwide.
We will explore new ways to integrate Cohere’s sovereign, made-in-Canada AI models into Microsoft services, helping to ensure Canadian enterprises and the public sector benefit from secure, locally developed solutions that embody responsibility and integrity. Together with Canada’s leading innovators, we are building relationships that deliver opportunity and impact while reinforcing the trusted foundation of Canadian digital sovereignty.
Defending the continuity of Canadian cloud services
Finally, in the face of geopolitical uncertainty, continuity is essential. Microsoft pledges to rigorously defend the uninterrupted operation of cloud services for Canadian government customers. If ever confronted with an order to suspend or halt operations in Canada, we will pursue every available legal and diplomatic avenue—including litigation—to protect access to critical infrastructure. Our track record demonstrates our resolve to stand up for customer rights. We remain ready to reinforce this commitment through robust contractual agreements, confident in our ability to ensure the ongoing operation of Canadian datacentres. Ultimately, these efforts aim to deepen trust between people, institutions, and nations, grounded in mutual respect and a shared commitment to advancing Canada’s digital future.
Microsoft’s digital infrastructure in Canada is not built on wheels. It is permanent infrastructure, and fully subject to Canadian laws and regulations. We recognize and respect that our operations in Canada are governed by Canadian law, just as we adhere to local laws in every country where we operate.
Talent: Investing in the Future for Every Canadian
At its core, every datacentre we build and every AI capability we deploy is an investment in Canadians and their future. Because technology alone doesn’t drive transformation, people do. That’s why it’s imperative to ensure that every Canadian can develop the skills needed to succeed in an AI era.
The need is clear. By 2030, nearly 60 percent of workers worldwide will require new digital skills, yet today only 24 percent of Canadians have received AI training, compared to a global average of 39 percent. Closing this gap is critical for Canada’s competitiveness.
Our new Microsoft Elevate business unit is designed to put people first, making AI opportunities accessible across the country. Since July 2024, Microsoft Canada has engaged 5.7 million learners through free skilling programs, with more than 546,000 individuals completing an AI training course. And we’re not stopping there. By 2026, Microsoft Elevate will help 250,000 Canadians earn in-demand AI credentials, ensuring the workforce is ready for the next decade of innovation.
Our partnerships amplify this impact. The Nonprofit AI Impact Hub, developed with the Canadian Centre for Nonprofit Digital Resilience (CCNDR) and Imagine Canada, strengthens the digital resilience of Canada’s 170,000 charities and nonprofits, which collectively employ 2.7 million people. Through role-based AI training and micro-credentials, we’re equipping this sector with tools to serve communities better.
We’re also investing in the next generation. Today, we are proud to announce a new partnership with Actua, a national leader that brings STEM education to youth throughout Canada, including those in remote, rural, and Indigenous communities. Microsoft Canada and Actua are committed to working with Indigenous communities across Canada to support AI skills development, so that the benefits of AI are felt widely. This partnership will support Actua’s AI Ready and InSTEM (Indigenous Youth in STEM) programs, to equip 20,000 young Canadians with essential AI skills. The InSTEM program will add AI learning for Indigenous youth, blending technology with cultural heritage and knowledge. For instance, students learn how AI tools can help preserve Indigenous languages and support cultural identity.
Canada Can Count on Us
Few American companies have benefitted more than Microsoft from such longstanding ties to Canada. Living so close to the border, we have long appreciated the many attributes that make Canada so special. We share more than geography. We share priorities like security, sustainability, and inclusive growth.
Today, we’re taking this partnership to the next level. We believe Canada has what it takes to help lead the world in responsible AI innovation and adoption, and we’re committed to being a partner every step of the way.
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