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AI is helping attackers automate, scale and vary bot campaigns, but it is not the sole explanation for rising bot and API threats. The risks still often come from familiar weaknesses: inadequate authorization, excessive resource use, exposed business workflows and APIs nobody is monitoring. At the same time, some automated traffic—such as search crawlers or bots responding to a user’s request—is legitimate. The practical response is to identify what a bot is doing, secure the API behind each workflow and apply controls suited to the business risk.
What do recent bot and API reports actually show?
Security vendors report increases across several kinds of activity, but the figures below come from different networks, time periods and methods. They are signals from each vendor’s observations or survey—not measurements that can be added together or treated as a global census.
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| Reported figure | Source and scope | What it measures |
|---|---|---|
| 300% increase | Akamai, announcement dated November 4, 2025; activity observed on Akamai’s platform compared with the prior year | AI bot activity. Akamai also said these bots made up nearly 1% of total bot traffic on its platform. |
| 12.5-fold year-over-year increase | Thales, 2026 Bad Bot Report; Thales analysis of full-year 2025 bot activity | AI-enabled bot attacks observed by Thales. |
| 40% of internet traffic | Thales, 2026 Bad Bot Report; the report’s analysis of observed traffic | Share attributed to bad bots in Thales’ analysis. This uses Thales’ definitions and traffic measurement, not Akamai’s denominator. |
| 87% | Akamai, 2026 report and announcement; surveyed organizations reporting on 2025 | Survey respondents who said their organization had at least one API-related security incident in 2025. It is not a finding about 87% of all organizations worldwide. |
| 113% year over year | Akamai, 2026 report and announcement | Increase in the average number of daily API attacks reported by Akamai. |
| 73% from 2023 to 2025 | Akamai, 2026 report and announcement | Increase in web application attacks reported by Akamai. |
| 104% from 2023 to 2025 | Akamai, 2026 report and announcement | Increase in Layer 7 distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks reported by Akamai. |
| 47.9% | Akamai, 2026 report and announcement; AI bot activity on its global network from July through December 2025 | Share of Akamai-observed AI bot traffic attributed to the commerce vertical—not the share of all internet bots. |
The figures describe different things: one is a survey result, while others describe traffic or attack activity observed by particular vendors. They should not be averaged or presented as a single rate. Akamai’s CTO of Security Strategy, Patrick Sullivan, said, “Automation and AI are making these sophisticated campaigns cheap, repeatable, and fast.” That is Akamai’s characterization of the trend, not independent proof that AI alone caused the reported increases.
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Automation can make it easier to repeat requests, vary patterns and run campaigns at scale. Generative AI can assist with tasks such as adapting content or producing variations, but the available vendor reporting does not establish that AI caused every increase in attacks. Akamai’s 2026 report preview argues that AI reinforces existing weaknesses and warns that attention to AI-specific fixes can distract from basic security controls.
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Those weaknesses are consequential because an automated system can repeatedly probe an API or exploit a workflow far faster than a person. Akamai has described harmful bot uses including content scraping, impersonation, phishing, identity fraud and abuse of commerce flows. Malicious automation can also raise operating costs, degrade performance and make analytics less reliable.
Why are APIs becoming a bigger security risk?
APIs connect applications, data and business processes. A request that is valid in format can still be unauthorized, excessive or harmful to a business workflow. The OWASP API Security Top 10 (2023) identifies these core risk categories:
- Broken object-level authorization
- Broken authentication
- Broken object property-level authorization
- Unrestricted resource consumption
- Broken function-level authorization
- Unrestricted access to sensitive business flows
- Server-side request forgery
- Security misconfiguration
- Improper inventory management
- Unsafe consumption of APIs
Authorization must apply to the specific data and action
Being signed in or permitted to call an endpoint does not prove that a user may access every record, field or function reachable through it. If an API accepts an object identifier from a user, the service needs to check that the authenticated user is allowed to act on that particular object. Property-level checks matter too: they can prevent sensitive fields from being exposed or changed without permission.
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Unbounded requests can affect availability and cost
A request may be legitimate in isolation but still consume excessive compute, return too many records or trigger costly downstream services when repeated. OWASP’s API4 guidance calls for limits on execution time, payload size, batch operations, records returned and interactions. It also recommends rate limiting and spending limits or billing alerts for metered third-party services.
Valid business workflows can be abused
Account creation, ticket purchasing and password recovery are normal features, not necessarily coding flaws. Yet repeated use can enable fraud, inventory hoarding or other harmful outcomes. Controls should consider the purpose and effect of a sequence of actions, not only whether each request passes basic validation.
Unknown APIs and connected services expand exposure
Untracked or obsolete API versions can remain reachable without the same monitoring and safeguards as current services. Integrations bring another risk: a service can trust data from a third-party API more than it would trust user input, allowing a weakness to pass through the connection. Akamai’s 2026 reporting describes campaigns combining API abuse, web application attacks and Layer 7 DDoS activity, as well as increased abnormal workflows and unauthorized activity in 2025 API attacks.
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How can you distinguish useful AI crawlers from harmful bots?
Do not classify traffic as safe or malicious solely because it is automated or described as AI-related. Cloudflare’s 2025 review distinguishes crawler activity for training, search and user action—for example, a bot visiting a site in response to a chatbot user’s request. Those trends reflect activity across Cloudflare customer sites, not every website.
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Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.How should companies protect APIs from bots and DDoS attacks?
Start with controls that remain useful whether activity comes from AI, conventional scripts or human users. OWASP’s guidance provides a practical baseline; Akamai’s 2025 security infographic also recommends API testing, adaptive protection, specialized DDoS defenses and bot defenses.
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- Build and maintain an API inventory. Include public, internal and third-party APIs, their versions, owners and sensitive-data exposure. Identify obsolete endpoints so they can be monitored or retired.
- Enforce authorization at each level. Check access to the requested object, property and function on every relevant request. Do not treat endpoint access as permission to every record or field.
- Strengthen input and output handling. Authenticate requests, validate inputs against expected schemas and return only the data needed for the task. Apply care to data received from integrated APIs rather than assuming it is trustworthy.
- Set resource and spending limits. Bound request size, execution time, batch size, pagination and the number of returned records. Use rate limits appropriate to each endpoint’s purpose, and set spending limits or alerts for metered services.
- Protect sensitive workflows. Monitor sequences and outcomes for actions such as account creation, recovery and purchases. Use thresholds and checks that reflect the consequences of repeated activity, rather than relying on request volume alone.
- Combine application, API and DDoS defenses. Apply controls at the points where your services are exposed, and ensure application-layer attacks are part of the protection plan. Bot classification should complement—not replace—authorization and resource controls.
- Test and review continuously. Include API security checks in development and testing, revisit inventory and limits as services change, and review alerts for both missed abuse and excessive blocking of legitimate traffic.
What should you look for in API security software?
Compare capabilities against your actual architecture and risks; a feature list alone does not establish effectiveness. Useful evaluation questions include:
- Discovery and inventory: Can it find APIs and versions across the deployment points you need to protect?
- Authorization: Does it help identify or enforce object-, property- and function-level access controls?
- Validation: Can it validate schemas and help control unsafe input or interactions with third-party APIs?
- Abuse and resource controls: Can limits be tuned by endpoint and business purpose, including sensitive sequences rather than only request rates?
- Bot handling: Can it distinguish useful crawler intent from suspicious behavior, and can your team choose different actions rather than block all automated traffic?
- DDoS coverage: Which deployment points and application-layer services are protected?
- Operational fit: What integration work is required? How useful are the visibility and alerts, and what ongoing tuning and staffing burden will protection require?
For example, Cloudflare’s API Shield documentation maps capabilities such as discovery, schema validation, rate limiting and bot management to OWASP risks. That is an example of how a provider describes its features, not a neutral comparative test. Akamai is another named provider in the application and API security category. The available evidence does not establish a best vendor or compare product effectiveness.
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