AI Email Attacks Grew 5x in 2025; AegisAI Launches Vanguard to Neutralize Adversarial AI CAPTCHAs
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AI Email Attacks Grew 5x in 2025; AegisAI Launches Vanguard to Neutralize Adversarial AI CAPTCHAs
PR Newswire
March 10, 2026 4 min read
New research from AegisAI reveals that AI-generated email attacks grew 5X in 2025, with sophisticated threats now bypassing traditional security filters more than 50% of the time. In response to this escalating threat landscape, the company is pre-announcing Project Vanguard, the industry's first proactive defense specifically engineered to defeat adversarial CAPTCHAs. Built by the team behind Google's reCAPTCHA, Project Vanguard applies decades of elite bot-defense experience to neutralize the next generation of AI-driven exploits.
SAN FRANCISCO, March 10, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- AegisAI, an AI-native email security company backed by Accel and Foundation Capital, today released State of the AI Threat in Email, a new study analyzing over 20,000 phishing, scam and malware emails. The findings are stark: AI-generated phishing attacks have grown 5x in 2025 and are 75% more effective at bypassing traditional email filters.
AI Spear Phishing as a Share of Total Phishing Volume
To respond to this rising threat AegisAI is announcing Vanguard, an autonomous defense AI agent designed to pursue evasive threats that hide behind CAPTCHAs, cloaked pages, and malicious documents, a blind spot for security tools.
The groundbreaking study of AI attacks was presented at the 2026 Messaging, Malware and Mobile Anti-Abuse Working Group (M3AAWG) conference and highlighted the following changes in the threat landscape.
Key Findings5x growth in 2025. AI-generated spear phishing grew from 2.8% to 13.9% of total observed phishing in 2025.
75% more effective AI-generated emails evade traditional filters at nearly double the rate of human-written attacks, reaching the inbox more than half the time.
72.6% of successful AI attacks passed email authentication. Attackers operate from compromised legitimate accounts with established authentication histories. The better-authenticated the email, the more likely it reaches the inbox.
Vanguard: Extending the Agent from Inbox to Payload
In response to these attacks, AegisAI is launching Vanguard: the first proactive defense that is designed to neutralize adversarial AI CAPTCHAs, cloaked web pages, and weaponized documents. The AegisAI team is leveraging their experience from working on reCAPTCHA at Google to combat this new wave of adversarial evasion.
AegisAI already deploys AI agents inside the inbox to catch attacks that slip past conventional filters. Vanguard extends those agents beyond the inbox. When an inbox agent flags a suspicious link or attachment, Vanguard follows it, navigating the open web just as a user would, to reach the actual malicious destination, whether it's a phishing page, a dangerous document, or a credential-harvesting form. It then delivers a complete threat report in minutes.
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