AI-Coding Becomes a Risky Norm as Use of AI-Coding Assistants Takes Off and More Than 80% of Organizations Ship Vulnerable Code

Business Wire

7 hours ago

BUSINESS WIRE)--Checkmarx, the leader in agentic AI-powered application security, today released the results of its annual survey titled 'Future of Application Security in the Era of AI,' offering a candid assessment of how AI‑accelerated development is reshaping the risk landscape and how to prepare for the year ahead. The study surveyed more than 1,500 CISOs, AppSec managers and developers across North America, Europe and Asia‑Pacific to understand how organizations are adapting to a world where software is increasingly written by machines.
Risky business: Global survey of tech and security leaders says only 18% of organizations have policies governing AI use, and 81% knowingly ship vulnerable code, up from 91% in 2024.
The findings paint a stark picture: AI‑generated code is becoming mainstream, but governance is lagging. Half of respondents already use AI security code assistants and 34% admit that more than 60% of their code is AI‑generated. Yet only 18% have policies governing this use. The growing adoption of AI coding assistants is eroding developer ownership and expanding the attack surface.
The research also shows that business pressure is normalizing risky practices. Eighty‑one percent of organizations knowingly ship vulnerable code, and 98% experienced a breach stemming from vulnerable code in the past year, that's a sharp rise from 91 % in 2024. Within the next 12 to 18 months, nearly a third (32%) of respondents expect Application Programming Interface (API) breaches via shadow APIs or business logic attacks. Despite these realities, fewer than half of the respondents report deploying foundational security tools, such as using mature application security tools such as dynamic application security testing (DAST) or infrastructure‑as‑code scanning. While DevSecOps is widely discussed industry-wide, only half of organizations surveyed actively use core tools and just 51% of North American organizations report adopting DevSecOps.
'The velocity of AI‑assisted development means security can no longer be a bolt‑on practice. It has to be embedded from code to cloud,' said Eran Kinsbruner, vice president of portfolio marketing. 'Our research shows that developers are already letting AI write much of their code, yet most organizations lack governance around these tools. Combine that with the fact that 81% knowingly ship vulnerable code and you have a perfect storm. It's only a matter of time before a crisis is at hand.'
The report outlines six strategic imperatives for closing the application security readiness gap: move from awareness to action, embed 'code‑to‑cloud' security, govern AI use in development, operationalize security tools, prepare for agentic AI in AppSec, and cultivate a culture of developer empowerment.
Kinsbruner added, 'To stay ahead, organizations must operationalize security tooling that is focused on prevention. They need to establish policies for AI usage and invest in agentic AI that can automatically analyze and fix issues real-time. AI generated code will continue to proliferate; secure software will be the competitive differentiator in the coming years.'
The release of this report follows Checkmarx's announcement of general availability of its Developer Assist agent, with extensions to top AI-native Integrated Development Environments (IDE) including Windsurf by Cognition, Cursor, and GitHub Copilot. This new agent—the first in a family of agentic-AI tools to enhance security for developers, AppSec leaders, and CISO's alike—delivers real-time, context-aware issue identification and guidance to developers as they code for autonomous prevention.
Download the full 'Future of Application Security in the Era of AI' report at Checkmarx website to learn how organizations can navigate the AI‑accelerated risk landscape and build secure‑by‑default development practices.
About Checkmarx
Checkmarx is the leader in agentic AI, cloud-native application security that empowers the world's largest development organizations with real-time scanning and closed-loop remediation to boost developer productivity on security tasks by up to 50%. Based on the powerful Checkmarx One platform that scans over six trillion lines of code each year, Checkmarx is designed for large-scale, hybrid human and AI-assisted development teams. Checkmarx. Always Ready to Run.
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