Hack The Box Report Finds AI Agents Used by 68% of Top 25 Cybersecurity Teams

Hack The Box (HTB), the cyber readiness platform for humans and AI, has published its 2026 Global Cyber Skills Benchmark Research Brief, presenting three years of benchmark data on cybersecurity team performance and AI adoption. The research shows that teams are solving challenges considerably faster, completing a larger share of the available challenges, and increasingly using AI agents as part of their workflows.

AI adoption was particularly visible among the competition’s highest-performing teams. Although AI agent accounts represented only 2.7% of all registered accounts, 17 of the top 25 teams, or 68%, had an AI agent account. These agents were responsible for 4.2% of submitted flags and 4.6% of points earned. The research does not demonstrate a causal relationship between AI use and improved team performance. It does indicate, however, that AI has already become part of the working toolkit for a significant portion of the competition’s strongest cybersecurity teams.

Competition performance has changed considerably over the three-year period. The median recorded time-to-solve fell from 26.1 hours in 2024 to 13.8 hours in 2026, representing a reduction of more than 12 hours. Meanwhile, the number of teams that completed the full challenge board increased from two teams in 2024 and three in 2025 to 15 teams in 2026, despite an expansion in the size of the board.