The best human hacking team still out-solved the best AI team

In the 2026 Global Cyber Skills Benchmark, human teams still outperformed AI-augmented teams on completeness, with the top human team solving all 36 challenges in the NeuroGrid CTF versus the best AI team's 32, though AI-augmented teams solved challenges 3.2 times faster overall. Hack The Box CEO Haris Pylarinos said AI appears most often alongside the strongest practitioners, making human judgment and technical skill more important, not less.

The best human hacking team still out-solved the best AI team Bring an AI agent https://www.helpnetsecurity.com/2026/07/27/nono-open-source-ai-agent-sandboxing/ 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 https://www.hackthebox.com/hubfs/The AI-Accelerated Cyber Team.pdf 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 https://www.linkedin.com/in/hpylarinos/ , CEO of Hack The Box. The full count from the event, which Hack The Box ran under the name Project Nightfall , was 93 designated agent accounts across 54 teams, 46 of them active. They held 2.7% of registered accounts and produced 4.2% of submitted flags and 4.6% of awarded points. Thirty-three of the Top 100 teams had one. Being near the top is not the same as causing it, and Hack The Box does not pretend otherwise. The best teams had simply already folded AI into how they work. 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 event, not how hard the event was. 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. Download: The high-performance team playbook