- Thales surveyed more than 3,000 IT experts about Generative AI
- The researchers found plenty of concern about security
- Despite the worries, businesses are accelerating adoption
Despite seeing it as a major innovation driver, businesses are overwhelmingly concerned about the security threats of artificial intelligence (AI). This is according to the 2025 Thales Data Threat Report, the company’s annual report on the latest data security threats, trends, and emerging topics.
Based on a survey of more than 3,100 IT and security professionals in 20 countries and across 15 industries, the Thales report found that nearly 70% of organizations view the rapid advancement of AI as their biggest security risk. Generative AI, which can create text and images from simple text prompts, is a particular concern.
Drilling deeper into these ideas, integrity and trustworthiness issues emerge as major challenges. Almost two-thirds (64%) of the respondents worry about AI’s lack of integrity, while 57% cited ‘trustworthiness’ as a major challenge. Also, since different GenAI functions like training, inference, or content generation, depend on user-provided data, the respondents expressed their concerns about increasing exposure to data security risks.
CISA added the flaws to KEV
Regardless of these worries, organizations are still accelerating their AI adoption, the report further explains, hinting that this puts them at unnecessary risk. In fact, a third of businesses are actively integrating GenAI into operations despite not ensuring full security of their systems. Spending on GenAI has become one of the key priorities for organizations, second only to cloud security.
“The fast-evolving GenAI landscape is pressuring enterprises to move quickly, sometimes at the cost of caution, as they race to stay ahead of the adoption curve,” Eric Hanselman, Chief Analyst at S&P Global Market Intelligence 451 Research, said. “Many enterprises are deploying GenAI faster than they can fully understand their application architectures, compounded by the rapid spread of SaaS tools embedding GenAI capabilities, adding layers of complexity and risk.”
Almost three-quarters (73%) of professionals reported investing in AI-specific security tools with either new or existing budgets, Thales’ report concluded.
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