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2026 State of Behavioral Security Research Brief

Five findings from 525 security leaders on behavioral baselining, machine identities, and AI agents. Every headline figure, in two pages.

Behavioral security has become a core security discipline. Broad adoption has exposed a harder challenge: defining normal precisely enough to separate meaningful risk from noise, and extending that understanding to machine identities and AI agents that make their own decisions.

Asked where their greatest behavioral-monitoring investment will go over the next 24 months, 43% of security leaders chose AI agents—more than three times any other category. Nearly as many, 46%, say they are not at all effective at baselining agent behavior today.

Inside:

  • Behavioral Security Has Gone Mainstream — Adoption is settled; precision is not.
  • The Knowing-Normal Gap — The leading obstacles aren’t budget or staffing.
  • The Understand-to-Act Gap — Detecting an anomaly is just the beginning.
  • The Machine Identity Confidence Paradox — Confidence runs highest where coverage runs thinnest.
  • The AI Agent Investment Paradox — The spending is decided ahead of the baselines.

Download the brief to see the data behind these findings.

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