Bad Bots in the Agentic Age: What the 2026 Thales Bad Bot Report Reveals
josh.pearson@t…
Thu, 04/30/2026 – 07:31
The modern internet is becoming less human by the day. Bot traffic is increasing, and human traffic is shrinking. Malicious automated traffic is getting harder to spot. The Thales 2026 Bad Bot Report, now in it’s 13th consecutive edition, is the most significant yet , as AI agents accelerate a permanent shift toward machine-driven internet activity. It breaks down how AI – and specifically AI agents – have transformed the internet, accelerating bot activity, complicating detection and monitoring to unprecedented levels, and putting businesses in jeopardy.
Tim Chang | Vice President, Application Security Products
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The modern internet is becoming less human by the day. Bot traffic is increasing, and human traffic is shrinking. Malicious automated traffic is getting harder to spot.
The Thales 2026 Bad Bot Report, now in it’s 13th consecutive edition, is the most significant yet , as AI agents accelerate a permanent shift toward machine-driven internet activity. It breaks down how AI – and specifically AI agents – have transformed the internet, accelerating bot activity, complicating detection and monitoring to unprecedented levels, and putting businesses in jeopardy.
Here are some of the key insights from this year’s report.
Automation Is Now the Default State of the Internet
It’s a strange and dangerous time to be online.
Bots now account for 53% of all internet traffic. Bad bots alone account for 40%, rising 3% from last year. That means two-fifths of all internet traffic is actively malicious , enabling automated cyber crime, fraud, and business logic abuse. In 2025, Thales blocked 17.2 trillion bad bot requests. What’s to blame for this rise? You guessed it – AI.
From 2024 to 2025, Thales observed a more than tenfold increase in daily AI-driven bot attacks, rising from just 2 million to 25 million. And yet, remarkably, that growth wasn’t even the most significant change 2025 b
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