The Theory 2026 AI Survey Results Theory's 2026 AI in Practice Survey, fielded to 455 senior technical builders on 22 September 2026, found security and governance rose from sixth to first among pain points in twelve months, with 43% of respondents rating it the most important pain point versus 22% for evals. The survey also found 45% of teams now route queries across models — 23.7% on a router they trained and 21.5% on a proprietary one — while 54.7% send every query to a single model, and among the 259 teams whose agents write and execute code, 62% host their sandboxes on Cloudflare, three times the closest competitor. Only 10% of the 455 builders say security tooling delivers the most value today, while 18% expect it to lead in the future, the largest expected gain of any area. The 2026 Theory AI Survey surprised us, just as the 2025 edition did. In 2025, we found that context, limited AI performance. In 2026, that seems to be solved. 455 senior technical builders replied to give us a cross-section of the AI ecosystem today. 1 fn:1 Security is the biggest barrier to adoption Security rose from sixth to first among pain points in twelve months. 43% of respondents rate security & governance the most important pain point, & evals come in second at less than half, 22%. Only 10% say security tooling delivers the most value today. 18% expect it to lead in the future, the largest expected gain of any area. Nearly half of teams route queries Cost optimisation as well as model selection have become standard. 45% of teams now route queries across models, 23.7% on a router they trained & 21.5% on a proprietary one, while 54.7% send every query to a single model. Cloudflare dominates sandboxes Of the 259 teams writing code with agents, 62% host their sandboxes on Cloudflare, three times the closest competitor. Then Other at 17%, Vercel at 17%, Modal at 16%, E2B at 12%, Daytona at 9% & Sail at 7%. The one control a builder cannot fake is concentrated in a single utility, & it is billed as compute rather than as security. BI performs more than half of agent analysis 56% of respondents use business intelligence tools to analyse the performance of their agents. The surprising statistic is not far behind : coding agents also perform some of the work, at 48%. Both systems are excellent at parsing agent behaviour. A roughly equivalent number use dedicated observability tools, at 41%, which does suggest a convergence of the category, at least for this one use case. Spreadsheets, that tardigrade