Human Hackers Outperform AI Teams in Solving Challenges

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The best human hacking team still out-solved the best AI team. Bring an AI agent to a hacking competition and you would expect to find it propping up the teams who were struggling. In the 2026 Global Cyber Skills Benchmark, agents showed up in 17 of the Top 25 finishers. The people who least needed help were the ones who brought it. The people who might have used a hand mostly did not, and they did not close the gap. Our data shows that AI is appearing most often alongside some of the strongest practitioners, not instead of them. As agents become more capable, human judgment, validation and hands-on technical skill become more important, not less, said Haris Pylarinos, CEO of Hack The Box.

AI’s Role in the 2026 Global Cyber Skills Benchmark

Twelve hours earlier, and no one can name the cause. Two years ago the median solve landed 26 hours into the competition. In 2026 it landed at 13.8. Half the clock disappeared. Board size, challenge mix, who showed up, how they prepared, and what tooling they had all changed over that stretch, and the data cannot separate them, so the drop tells you when useful work happened rather than how skilled anyone became. Full completions moved the same way. Two teams cleared every challenge in 2024. Three did in 2025. Fifteen did in 2026. Board design changed too, so that count tracks breadth, coordination, and endurance across a whole.

The Humans Won on Completeness, the Machines on Speed

Hack The Box ran the cleaner test a year earlier, at the NeuroGrid CTF in November 2025, putting AI-augmented teams and human-only teams on the same challenge set. Across the whole field, the AI side solved at 3.2 times the rate. Among the Top 5%, that shrank to 1.69. Speed went the other way: the best AI-augmented teams worked three to four times faster. And the team that finished everything, all 36 challenges, was human. The best AI team stopped at 32.

“As agents become more capable, human judgment, validation and hands-on technical skill become more important, not less,” said Haris Pylarinos, CEO of Hack The Box.

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