6 key takeaways from RSA Conference 2026

At RSA Conference 2026, security leaders discussed a major tension: adopting AI quickly for competitive advantage while protecting against threats that AI itself is creating. The conference confirmed that AI has become central to cybersecurity conversations, with discussions covering both AI as a defensive tool and as an offensive weapon that attackers can use at extreme speed. The threat surface for enterprise AI systems has expanded significantly beyond initial concerns, now including data leakage, shadow AI (unauthorized AI tools), prompt injection (tricking AI by hiding instructions in its input), copyright issues, hallucinations (when AI generates false information), and data residency problems, all of which can occur simultaneously when organizations adopt AI tools.