Businesses in the UK have reported a growing number of AI-driven cyber attacks over the past year, according to new survey from Databarracks.

The company's poll of 500 IT decision-makers in UK organisations found that 25% had experienced an AI-driven cyber attack, up from 12% in 2025. For the second consecutive year, AI-driven cyber threats were identified as the biggest resilience challenge over the next five years.

The findings come amid growing scrutiny of AI's cyber capabilities, following OpenAI's recent disclosure that one of its AI models, during testing in a controlled and isolated environment, autonomously carried out a coordinated cyber attack against an organisation.

The Databarracks survey found that 85% of the organisations it polled now assess AI risk at least annually. Larger organisations were more likely to have experienced AI-driven attacks, with 41% making AI threat response a resilience priority.

Despite the increase in attacks, 79% of respondents to the survey said they believe AI offers greater benefits than threats to security. Some 93% of resilience teams use AI in some capacity and 61% of organisations have increased AI budgets, compared with 55% for security and 36% for backup and disaster recovery.

James Watts, managing director at Databarracks, said: “The findings reveal the new reality of cyber risk. Even before AI, cyber was the fastest-developing threat. We’ve seen it grow from being the leading cause of downtime for just 6% of organisations ten years ago to 30% today. With AI now capable of autonomously exploiting the vulnerabilities it finds, attackers have gained a significant advantage.

“At the same time, AI brings powerful new capabilities to cyber defence and broader resilience, which helps explain why organisations remain optimistic about it. The conclusion we reached on cyber response remains the same, and it is now even more important: organisations must plan for a breach and prepare for recovery. Even the most mature organisations cannot prevent every incident.”

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