AI-powered OT cybersecurity: Securing critical infrastructure

Operational technology (OT) cybersecurity is entering a new era—one defined by AI-enabled threats, machine-speed intrusions, and autonomous attack chains. As adversaries leverage AI to accelerate reconnaissance and exploitation, protecting national critical infrastructure now requires AI-native defense capabilities. 

This article explores the shift and how CPX is helping the UAE build AI-driven resilience across its most critical sectors.

For years, AI in cybersecurity was talked about as a possibility, a vision of what might eventually come. We imagined AI accelerating workflows, supporting analysts, and helping detect anomalies faster. Yet even in our most forward-looking discussions, humans were always at the center, with AI acting merely as an assistant.

That assumption no longer holds.

The first AI-orchestrated APT espionage campaign is no longer a hypothetical scenario. In mid-September 2025, Anthropic reported a state-sponsored group that hijacked its Claude Code tool to run end-to-end intrusion chains against ~30 global organizations, automating 80–90% of the workload across recon, exploitation, lateral movement, and data staging¹.

At the same time, a breakthrough study in the OT community showed something equally transformative. In a global industrial security competition with more than a thousand professional teams, an AI system climbed to the top of the rankings within hours. It completed malware challenges, analyzed protocols, solved forensics problems, and built exploitation chains faster than many of the world’s best human teams learning, adapting, and iterating continuously².

These events tell a clear story: AI is no longer a tool in cyber operations: it is now an active participant.

And nowhere does this shift matter more than in OT, where cyber risk becomes physical risk, and stability is inseparable from national resilience.

How AI is transforming the OT threat landscape

OT cybersecurity has changed dramatically. Attacks today rarely begin in the OT domain. Instead, they originate in IT networks, cloud systems, supply chains, and remote access pathways. Once inside, attackers now understand how industrial processes work, how engineering workstations are configured, how PLCs communicate, how safety logic is designed, and how historian data reflects actual plant behavior.

Modern attackers move with intention. They manipulate operational parameters, exploit misconfigurations, and cause disruptions not by brute force, but through precise interference in the processes that keep infrastructure functioning. OT is no longer obscure or insulated. It has become a strategic target.

The danger grows when adversarial AI is introduced into this landscape. AI can analyze logs in seconds, map network relationships instantly, learn industrial protocols on its own, and produce viable exploit paths without fatigue. What once required days or weeks of effort can now be compressed into minutes.

This is the arrival of machine-speed intrusions, and it demands machine-speed defense.

AI as the new backbone of industrial operations

As industrial enterprises digitize, AI is becoming inseparable from how they operate. Recent research shows that while organizations are optimistic about AI’s potential, most remain early in their maturity journey. Many have gaps in data readiness, skill alignment, and governance, making it difficult to transition from isolated AI proofs-of-concept to fully integrated, operational AI systems.

This maturity gap is revealing. It shows that while industry believes in AI’s transformative value, deployment in industrial environments requires careful management. Reliability, safety, and continuity cannot be compromised. AI in OT works best not as a replacement for human expertise, but as an augmentation: enhancing operator visibility, accelerating insights, and helping engineers focus on decisions that truly matter.

In cybersecurity, the pattern is the same. AI provides unmatched speed and analytical power, but its deployment must be governed by safety frameworks, human oversight, and strong controls. As the adoption curve rises, those who embrace AI early and responsibly will shape the standards for industrial security and resilience.

The UAE’s Vision: AI as a national strategic resource

Few nations are as proactive as the UAE in recognizing AI’s strategic significance. When the country’s leadership refers to “AI as the new oil³,” it reflects a deeper truth: AI is becoming the engine of economic strength, global competitiveness, and national resilience.

The UAE’s digital resilience strategy is built on five pillars: partnership, governance, protection, innovation, and technology building. AI is at the center of all five. The nation understands that in a world where AI can power attacks, only AI-empowered defense can safeguard infrastructure.

This is the environment where CPX operates, and the mission we are committed to advancing.

CPX's AI-native approach to OT security

At CPX, we see the future of OT cybersecurity not as a series of tools or frameworks, but as an evolving ecosystem: one where AI and human expertise work together to protect national assets.

In the CPX OT SOC, AI accelerates detection and response. It analyzes network behavior, correlates alerts across IT and OT environments, extracts insights from vast telemetry, and identifies subtle anomalies that traditional tools cannot detect. Analysts are no longer overwhelmed by volume; they are empowered by clarity.

In vulnerability management, AI helps identify risks that matter most—not by counting vulnerabilities, but by understanding their operational and safety implications. It knows that not all CVEs are created equal, and that in OT, the consequences of downtime matter as much as the severity of a finding.

In threat intelligence, AI reads global reports, detects patterns, clusters adversary behaviors, and surfaces the insights that matter for regional critical infrastructure. Intelligence becomes operational in real time.

And across all of this, governance remains the backbone. AI operates under human supervision, within safe boundaries, and with full accountability.

CPX is not merely integrating AI, we are building AI-native security capabilities aligned with the UAE’s national priorities.

Defending critical infrastructure against autonomous AI attacks

The threat landscape has shifted. We are no longer defending against human-speed attackers. We are defending against autonomous systems.

This demands a new defensive posture where AI handles scale, speed, and first-stage reasoning, while human defenders focus on strategy, judgment, and cross-domain interpretation. It demands architectures where detection takes seconds instead of hours, where response is informed by real-time intelligence, and where national-scale coordination is built into the cybersecurity fabric.

This is the next generation of OT cybersecurity. It is not theoretical. It is now.

A turning point for critical infrastructure protection

The rise of AI-driven intrusions signals a turning point for critical infrastructure protection. The rules have changed, the pace has accelerated, and the stakes have multiplied. But this moment is also an opportunity, a chance to build resilient, intelligent, and adaptive cyber defenses that match the speed of modern threats.

At CPX, the future is already taking shape. CPX is building defensive strategies, building the AI-native capabilities, and delivering the operational resilience that this new era requires.

The era of AI-driven defense has arrived. And CPX is ready to lead.

Explore CPX’s OT cybersecurity services.

Citations:

1. https://www.anthropic.com/news/disrupting-AI-espionage
2. https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.05119
3. https://www.weforum.org/stories/2025/10/ai-new-oil-uae-cyber-chief-digital-resilience-amgfcc/