Alston & Bird Privacy, Cyber & Data Strategy Blog

IBM recently released its Cost of a Data Breach Report 2026, which highlights the changing cyber threat landscape in which artificial intelligence (AI) is accelerating how threat actors identify vulnerabilities, launch attacks, and exploit compromised systems. These trends are reflected in rising average breach costs, with the global average cost rising 12% to a record […]

On July 20, 2026, the European Commission (EC) published new Guidelines on Transparency of AI-Generated Content (available here) to complement the Code of Practice on Transparency of AI-Generated Content it released on June 10, 2026 (available here). The materials arrive just weeks before the AI Act’s transparency obligations take effect on August 2, 2026, and […]

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The Department of Defense (“DOD”) has announced the immediate suspension of the Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification (CMMC) Phase II requirements, which were scheduled to take effect on November 10, 2026. This announcement is significant because, as we noted in our prior advisory, Phase II was expected to move CMMC toward more formal assessment requirements for […]

On July 8, 2026, the European Data Protection Board (“EDPB”), the body that coordinates the EU’s national data protection authorities, published its first draft of Guidelines 03/2026 on web scraping in the context of generative AI (the “Guidelines”). The Guidelines address practical compliance challenges for companies that develop AI models or systems and scrape personal […]<...

The White House has launched “Gold Eagle,” a new cybersecurity vulnerability coordination clearinghouse designed to use advanced AI capabilities to accelerate how the government and industry identify, prioritize, verify, and remediate software vulnerabilities. The initiative was established under the June 2, 2026 Executive Order, “Promoting Advanced Artificial Intelligence In...