Singapore Firms Trust AI to Fight Cyberattacks — Even After 61% Were Hit by One
Source: Singapore Business Review
Singapore's relationship with AI in cybersecurity is starting to look like a paradox: organisations here trust AI with their defences more than almost anywhere else in the world, yet they are still getting hit — hard. A new report from security vendor Arctic Wolf finds that while more than half of Singapore...
Singapore's relationship with AI in cybersecurity is starting to look like a paradox: organisations here trust AI with their defences more than almost anywhere else in the world, yet they are still getting hit — hard. A new report from security vendor Arctic Wolf finds that while more than half of Singapore organisations trust AI to independently triage security alerts and patch vulnerabilities, 61% experienced a major cyber incident over the past year.
The 2026 AI & Cybersecurity Trends Report shows the damage here is unusually severe when it lands: 13% of affected Singapore organisations suffered disruptions lasting six to nine months — more than three times the global average. The report also names AI, large language models and agentic AI as Singapore's top cybersecurity concern, with 53% of organisations identifying secure AI adoption as their leading priority, versus 41% globally. Yet only 14% say AI is central to their security strategy, and just 53% trust AI to carry out narrowly defined tasks like blocking malicious IP addresses, citing false positives.
Steve Hunter, Arctic Wolf's director of engineering for APAC, frames the findings as confidence without outcomes: Singapore firms are both more trusting of AI and more clear-eyed about its risks than most markets, but that combination "hasn't yet translated into stronger outcomes". The pattern echoes a wider theme in recent local coverage — from the MAS and ABS AI cyber risk taskforce to boards being told AI oversight is now a fiduciary issue. Adoption is racing ahead of the governance structures needed to keep it safe.
The gap matters because the stakes are compounding: 94% of organisations now use large language models, and 94% say AI capabilities influence their security purchasing decisions, while 52% of Singapore firms lean on managed security services to cover skills shortages. If trust in AI outruns verification, the same automation that speeds up threat response can also widen the blast radius of a mistake.
Why it matters for Singapore: For a market positioning itself as a global AI hub — and a financial centre whose regulators are actively prodding institutions to govern AI agents — the Arctic Wolf data is a useful reality check. The priority, as Hunter puts it, is not adopting agentic AI faster; it is building the oversight, governance and human expertise around it so that trust is earned rather than assumed.
