At the 2026 Beijing Cybersecurity Conference, Qi Xiangdong, the chairman of Chinese security giant Qi-Anxin, warned that the era of artisan-style digital combat has ended. The advent of sophisticated AI agents and large-scale models, specifically mentioning tools like Mythos, has ushered in an age of 'industrialized' cyberattacks. This shift is fundamentally tilting the scales toward attackers, who can now leverage automation to conduct high-frequency, low-cost trials that traditional, human-led defenses struggle to counter.
The frequency of significant security breaches is accelerating at an alarming rate. What was once considered a 'once-in-several-years' event is rapidly becoming a 'several-times-a-year' reality. This transition from sporadic to chronic threat levels means that traditional static and manual protection protocols are effectively obsolete. In this new landscape, the 'defender’s dilemma' is magnified: while an attacker needs only one successful breach to claim victory, a defender must maintain a perfect record while simultaneously managing operational costs and regulatory compliance.
Critically, the primary theater of this digital conflict is shifting away from government infrastructure toward the broader private sector, specifically traditional manufacturing and service industries. As these sectors undergo 'intelligent' transformations, they integrate AI into core production lines, making the cost of a digital outage potentially life-threatening or economically ruinous. This vulnerability is driving a fundamental reassessment of security budgets, with firms increasingly viewing cybersecurity not as an IT cost, but as a core business necessity comparable to their sales expenditures.
To close the widening gap, Qi advocates for a 'three-in-one' integrated defense architecture that mirrors social governance models. This system utilizes a foundational large model for intelligence and decision-making, intelligent agents for operational command, and full-stack AI-enabled security products for execution. Without such an integrated, automated response system, Chinese enterprises risk falling further behind in an arms race where the offense is naturally favored by the economics of scale provided by artificial intelligence.
The scale of China's cybersecurity industry remains a point of concern compared to global peers. Despite the rapid digital transition, China’s cybersecurity market is projected to reach only 80 billion yuan by 2026—less than 10% of the U.S. market, which is expected to exceed 1 trillion yuan. This disparity suggests that while the technological threat is global, the commercial and strategic response within China still has significant ground to cover to match the sophistication of the evolving threat landscape.