How does SecOps feel about AI? Excessive agency
F5, Thursday, March 19th, 2026
In the second half of 2025, AI moved from decision aid to decision maker, and security teams are anxiously preparing for the consequences of that autonomy.
That's at least the prevailing sentiment extracted from the latest update to our F5 AI sentiment research, a comprehensive study of how the top 500 contributors in the Internet's largest cybersecurity community, Reddit's r/cybersecurity, feel about AI.
In our last analysis, shadow AI concerns and data security for third-party AI services dominated practitioner mindshare, but in the second half of 2025, the locus of concerns shifted to the excessive agency and access provisioned to their own enterprises' AI deployments.