Safety company Human Security recently released the "2026 AI Traffic and Cyber Threat Benchmark Report," indicating that the Internet is undergoing a fundamental shift: automated traffic generated by AI and robots is rapidly replacing humans as the main participants in online interactions.

The report shows that by 2025, AI-driven traffic has increased nearly threefold, with a growth rate eight times faster than human activity.

Surge in Automated Traffic: From Crawlers to Intelligent Agents

The report states that AI-driven monthly traffic surged by 187% in 2025, with traffic from AI Agents (intelligent agents) and proxy browsers increasing by as much as 7851% year-over-year.

This explosive growth is mainly driven by the huge demand for data from generative AI and the widespread use of autonomous intelligent agents like OpenClaw. Currently, over 95% of AI traffic is concentrated in the retail, media, and tourism industries, with machines effectively replacing humans as the main "conversational partners" on the other end of the internet.

image.png

Escalation of Cyber Threats: Attack Frequency Doubles

Along with changes in traffic structure comes an increase in security risks. The report shows that the proportion of global network crawler attacks has approached 20%, doubling since 2022. More seriously, the number of account intrusion attempts after login has increased by more than four times year-over-year, with an average of over 400,000 attacks detected per organization.

Matthew Prince, CEO of Cloudflare, predicts that by 2027, traffic from AI robots will officially exceed that of humans. This means the basic assumption that "the other end of the screen is a person" at the birth of the Internet is crumbling, and cyberspace is evolving into a battlefield between machines.