Artificial Intelligence in Cybersecurity and Its Evolving Landscape

The transition of Artificial Intelligence (AI) from a supportive tool to an autonomous agent has reshaped the cybersecurity landscape.The late-2025 disclosure of Anthropic's GTG-1002 campaign-the first documented AI-orchestrated cyber-espionage operation-illustrates the emergence of "agentic" threats capable of autonomous reasoning and tool manipulation.This survey examines the current AI-driven cybersecurity ecosystem across intrusion detection, malware analysis, phishing identification, and deepfake mitigation.In addition to established architectures such as Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) and Vision Transformers (ViT), we evaluate emerging RIST technologies, including Robust Instruction Tuning for safeguarding models against jailbreaks, Recursive Image Super-resolution Transformers for detecting subtle deepfake artifacts, and Reliable Internet Stream Transport for securing telemetry.The study synthesizes benchmark results from datasets like CICIDS2017 and FaceForensics++, and addresses socio-technical risks such as "sleeper-agent" backdoors in foundation models.By connecting the rise of autonomous threat vectors with advanced defensive protocols, this work outlines a roadmap toward resilient, agent-resistant cybersecurity systems.