On the defensive side, AI systems monitor network traffic and user behavior for anomalies that would be nearly impossible for a human team to catch manually — a login from an unusual location at an unusual hour, a sudden spike in data leaving the network, a file behaving like ransomware before it fully encrypts anything.
On the offensive side, the same underlying technology lowers the barrier for attackers. AI can write more convincing phishing emails, generate malware variants that evade signature-based detection, and even clone a person's voice from a short audio sample for use in scam calls.
The net effect is an accelerating arms race: security teams are increasingly using AI defensively simply because the volume and sophistication of AI-assisted attacks has outgrown what manual review can keep up with.