The First Public AI-Model Breach Will Reprice Every MSP

Michael Gray, the CTO at Thrive, made a prediction for 2026 that most MSP executives read and moved past: a coming “moment of truth” when a major public breach of an AI model forces companies to treat AI as critical infrastructure.

It’s worth stopping on that one, because the mechanics behind it are already proven. The only thing missing is the headline.

The quiet breaches have already happened

In June 2025, researchers at Aim Security disclosed EchoLeak (CVE-2025-32711), a zero-click prompt injection vulnerability in Microsoft 365 Copilot. An attacker could embed instructions in an ordinary email. When a user later asked Copilot a question that caused it to retrieve that email, the embedded instructions executed and exfiltrated confidential data. No click, no attachment, no credential theft. The user did nothing wrong except use the assistant as designed.

In April 2026, Vercel disclosed a breach that started in February. An employee at Context.ai, an AI vendor in Vercel’s supply chain, was infected with infostealer malware. The attacker used stolen OAuth tokens, including a Google Workspace integration that had been granted broad permissions, to move into Vercel’s systems and stay there for roughly two months. Source code, API keys, and 580 employee records ended up listed for sale at $2 million.

Neither event produced the repricing Gray is talking about. EchoLeak was patched before public exploitation was confirmed. Vercel was one company’s bad quarter. But look at what the two incidents prove together: AI assistants can be turned into exfiltration channels by anyone who can send an email, and AI vendor integrations create standing access that survives long after anyone remembers granting it.

That combination, applied to a company whose name your clients’ CFOs recognize, is the moment of truth.

Clients are adopting faster than anyone is governing

The exposure math is lopsided. Metomic’s data security research found 68 percent of organizations have experienced data leaks tied to AI tool usage, while only 23 percent have a formal security policy addressing it. Gartner found that only 24 percent of enterprises maintain a dedicated AI security governance function. Cyberhaven measured what employees actually paste into chatbots and found 11 percent of it is confidential.

Now narrow that to the mid-market companies MSPs serve. These are businesses without a CISO, without a security committee, and often without anyone who could produce a list of the AI tools in use across the company. Their employees adopted ChatGPT, Copilot, and a long tail of AI-enabled SaaS the same way they adopted Dropbox in 2012: individually, quietly, and without asking.

The MSP is the only party in that relationship positioned to see the whole picture. Which is why the top questions MSPs are asking each other, according to Cynomi’s June 2026 analysis of practitioner communities, are things like “Are clients leaking sensitive data into AI tools?” and “How do we say no to client AI requests without losing the account?”

Those are governance questions. The industry is circling the offering without naming it.

What repricing actually looks like

When the public breach lands, the response won’t be panic about AI. It will be a sudden demand for the boring apparatus of control, arriving from three directions at once.

Insurance carriers will add AI governance questions to cyber renewal applications, the way they added MFA questions after the ransomware wave of 2020-21. Answer them badly and premiums move, or coverage carves out AI-related incidents.

Procurement and vendor-risk teams will push AI questionnaires down the supply chain. Fewer than 30 percent of organizations have a formal AI vendor risk process today, according to Grip Security’s research, while 98 percent use SaaS with embedded AI. That gap closes fast once a headline provides the budget justification.

Regulators are already moving on their own schedule. The EU AI Act’s transparency obligations take effect in August 2026 even after the omnibus agreement pushed the high-risk system deadlines to late 2027. US clients with European operations or customers will feel that pull regardless of what Washington does.

Every one of those pressures lands on companies that cannot answer basic questions about their own AI usage. Someone has to do that work. The only question is whether it’s their MSP or a stranger.

The offering to build now

The service line writes itself once you stop thinking of it as an AI product and start thinking of it as governance delivered through tools you already run.

Start with an AI usage audit. Inventory the AI tools in the environment, the browser extensions, the OAuth grants, the SaaS platforms with embedded AI features. Map what data flows into each. This is discovery work your RMM and identity tooling already supports, and the deliverable shocks most clients into action on its own.

Second, a written acceptable-use policy. Which tools are approved, which data classes never leave the building, who approves new AI vendors. Most clients have nothing. A two-page policy beats a blank stare in front of an insurance auditor.

Third, technical guardrails. DLP rules covering AI endpoints, permission scoping on AI integrations, and a standing review of OAuth grants. The Vercel breach traveled through an over-permissioned integration that nobody was watching. That review is billable work every quarter.

Fourth, fold ongoing AI risk monitoring into your vCISO or managed security offering. New tool requests, vendor assessments, incident tabletop exercises that include an AI scenario. This turns a one-time project into recurring revenue.

None of this requires hiring AI researchers. It requires the compliance and security muscles MSPs already have, pointed at a category clients haven’t organized yet.

Position before the headline

After the breach goes public, this market gets loud. Every security vendor will ship an AI governance SKU within a quarter, and buyers will be rightly suspicious of anyone who discovered the problem the same week they did.

The MSPs that win that moment will be the ones with an offering already on the price list, reference clients already governed, and a methodology they can show. When a client calls in a panic asking whether they’re exposed, the answer “here’s the audit we ran for you in Q3, here’s your policy, here’s what changed since” is worth more than any marketing budget.

Gray’s moment of truth is coming on someone else’s timeline. The offering that answers it can be built on yours.