2026 Deepfake Outlook: Cautious Optimism as Deepfake Threats Escalate, While Detection Closes the Gap

Deepfakes have reached a point where even my parents and their friends question everything they see. This isn't because I, the CEO of a deepfake detection platform, warned them, but because deepfakes are now unavoidable in every medium. This saturation was inevitable given the regulatory inaction throughout 2025— a trend that will unfortunately persist, allowing malicious content to run rampant.

Yet there is no room for doomerism. Our team of innovators and a legion of partners are currently working diligently to proactively combat these harms. While predicting AI's trajectory is often a fool's errand — Deepseek's sudden rise trumped every 2026 forecast — our work at Reality Defender and conversations with industry leaders give me at least enough confidence that the following shifts will happen this year.

1. The Deepfake Problem Will Only Get Worse (Partially Thanks to Agents)

We live in a world where the highest officials in our government can be socially engineered and impersonated. Such instances will only become more convincing and sophisticated.

The ease and cost of access, coupled with increasingly more realistic media generation, will only deceive more people into believing and/or doing the wrong things faster at a greater scale. AI agents will amplify this, allowing for highly sophisticated one-to-many attacks done with infinitely fewer resources and dedicated hours than even a year ago.

This heightened accessibility has already fueled a surge in attacks: deepfake scams in the crypto sector alone surged 456% year-over-year, and voice phishing attacks in traditional finance increased by 170% in Q2 2025. Coupled with a lack of protection at the individual and enterprise levels, more people will be impacted by weaponized deepfakes and not know about it until the damage is already done.

2. Deepfakes Will Become More Convincing

Deepfakes exist to fool humans into believing they are real, not machines. The release of Sora 2 in 2025 showed just how quickly AI-generated media can evolve. In under a year, the jump from Sora to Sora 2 delivered markedly more realistic, high-fidelity outputs — a reminder of how fast manipulated content is closing the gap with reality. As newer audiovisual models push realism even further, we're entering an era where generative systems routinely hide their own artifacts and fool even highly trained experts. We've already seen this firsthand: in internal tests, our own PhDs incorrectly labeled at least one manipulated sample as real.

The downside to the most convincing generative AI content in the world is, among other things, using it to convince people to believe and/or do things they otherwise would not. We've already established that this will happen at a greater clip going into the next year. It's worth noting, however, that the more astute, careful, and wary individuals who fancy themselves fully protected from such content will very quickly find out that such belief is markedly wrong.

3. Deepfake Detection Will Increase in Robustness

Deepfake detection models — like those used on the Reality Defender platform — are robust now against even the newest generation models as they see release. Yet as generative models improve in believability and use novel ways to create audio, video, and still images, detection models will need to adapt.

This is, of course, not new. In Reality Defender's approach, we've fought against deepfakes in two ways: the traditional cybersecurity method — building in protections to new things seen in the wild immediately after they're caught — and by looking at where the industry is going, building potential techniques that could be productized into our models for future-proofing, so to speak. We will continue to do this for the express purpose of continuing to be the most powerful, capable deepfake detection solution in existence. For us, this largely means updating and improving our detection models while introducing exciting new ones to protect against every modality.

As mentioned before, deepfakes exist to fool humans, but not machines. While outputs may appear more convincing to even AI researchers, well-trained and deployed deepfake models can see through said outputs — even as they blow past the uncanny valley.

4. Cross-Industry Collaboration Is Required to Combat the Most Dangerous Deepfakes

Reality Defender is not the end-all, be-all solution to issues related to deepfakes (yet). Partnerships are absolutely key. By integrating with ID verification platforms, contact center systems, voice security solutions, social monitoring tools, and generative model providers, we're able to strengthen sector-specific protection and stay ahead of emerging manipulation techniques.

Promising and unique new efforts are already underway. SynthId, which is baked into Google's models and likely to be adopted by other multi-modal generative AI models, builds on the failures of previous provenance techniques and, as of this writing, cannot be defeated by the previous techniques used to thwart provenance watermarking. In the music world, companies like Uhmbrella are not only able to determine real music from fake, but attribute the training data used to create a fake song back to the original artist.

When coupled with other solutions including our own, those seeking deepfake detection on all fronts are provided the same "Swiss Cheese" approach in cybersecurity that other non-AI protections have long enjoyed. This strengthens an entity's ability to detect deepfakes across all conceivable mediums and in the most vulnerable entry points.

I would be remiss if I did not mention our elected officials' desire to combat deepfakes proactively. Based on bipartisan discussions we've been privy to in Washington and elsewhere, we know that many of our elected officials know that, with deepfakes being an everyone and everywhere problem, everyone and everywhere is impacted. By continuing to work with lawmakers and other related parties, I truly believe that bipartisan legislation focused on proactive protection against deepfakes will appear in 2026, with the majority of those impacted — that is, everyone — in favor of such laws.

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Given the pace of AI development, many things can and will happen in our world before the end of this year. Nonetheless, I truly believe that, while we as a people will continue to experience the negative effects and impacts that deepfakes bring, a turning point exists on the horizon of 2026 to make sure it is not a forever and always problem. We as a company cannot do it alone, and look forward to working with partners, customers, colleagues, and competitors to help shape the world we wished for when we first started our company in 2021: one where individuals and organizations alike have strong protection from deepfake harms across every part of their digital lives.