By 2026, the defining feature of the internet will no longer be human attention but machine interaction. Networks originally built for people are rapidly being repurposed for software agents that negotiate, transact and decide among themselves. Traffic patterns already indicate that machine-to-machine communication—driven by AI assistants, autonomous agents and enterprise automation—is on track to dominate.
Security researchers at Radware argue that this shift fundamentally changes where cyber risk resides. APIs are becoming the nervous system of the machine economy. Every automated decision depends on them, making them an increasingly attractive target. The most consequential attacks will not be noisy disruptions, but subtle manipulations: poisoned data, corrupted context and compromised upstream dependencies that quietly distort outcomes at scale.
Autonomy amplifies the danger. As machines act without human oversight, decision cycles shrink to milliseconds. Security models designed around users, credentials and manual response struggle to keep pace. A single tainted data source or misdirected API call can propagate errors across thousands of automated processes, with commercial consequences far beyond IT.
If 2025 popularised AI, 2026 may be remembered as the year machines became the internet—and human-centric security assumptions stopped being sufficient.
