The latest on security from Google Cloud's Office of the CISO, twice a month. Welcome to the first Cloud CISO Perspectives for September 2026. Today, Sandra Joyce shares the latest details on Google’s visibility into how attackers are using AI, and how we’re using AI to stop them. Our curated insights hub for boards of directors highlights resources on cybersecurity, risk governance, and security transformation, including the latest blogs and research from Google Cloud. Anyone operating in security knows that speculation is a major liability during periods of technological disruption.

While there is plenty of hype and understandable concern around how threats might use and target AI, a CISO’s AI security strategy has to be anchored in ground truth. Google operates at a rare intersection as both a frontier AI lab and a security company with a frontline view of global incidents. This dual vantage point allows us to understand how AI is built, and exactly how AI is being targeted in the wild. To provide the operational realities that security and business leaders need in the AI era, Google Threat Intelligence Group (GTIG) recently released our latest AI Threat Tracker .

When we strip away the noise and look at the telemetry, the real threat landscape boils down to three structural shifts that CISOs must address: Today, we’re sharing details on Google’s visibility into these three challenges, and our approach for solving them. AI has fundamentally altered software development velocity. Across the industry, autonomous agents and AI workflows now push code into production at unprecedented speed. This creates exciting opportunities for innovation, yet CISOs are faced with the difficult task of mitigating enterprise risk while maintaining business momentum.

We’re seeing threat actors turn our greatest engineering shortcut against us by contaminating upstream packages that AI assistants are trained to suggest and trust. GTIG believes that malicious contamination of AI-assisted coding practices has been contributing to the significant growth in large-scale, open-source software supply chain compromises we observed in 2025 and early 2026 . We’re also monitoring adversaries targeting agents. The financially-motivated threat actor TeamPCP (UNC6780) has implemented more than half a dozen methods to exploit AI tools and open-source software development practices, including