Theory 2026 AI survey: security tops pain points, Cloudflare leads agent sandboxes
Theory published the second annual edition of its AI in Practice Survey, fielded to 455 senior technical builders on 22 September 2026. Security and governance rose from sixth to first among pain points in twelve months: 43% rate it the most important pain point, with evals second at 22%; only 10% say security tooling delivers the most value today, but 18% expect it to lead in the future, the largest expected gain of any area. Routing is now standard practice, with 45% of teams routing queries across models — 23.7% on a router they trained and 21.5% on a proprietary one — while 54.7% still send every query to a single model. Among the 259 teams whose agents write and execute code, 62% host their sandboxes on Cloudflare, over three times the closest option (Other and Vercel at 17% each), followed by Modal 16%, E2B 12%, Daytona 9% and Sail 7%. Agent performance analysis is led by business intelligence tools at 56%, with coding agents at 48%, dedicated observability tools at 41% and spreadsheets at 30%.
The survey suggests enterprise AI's bottleneck is shifting from model capability to security and governance, while agent runtime infrastructure consolidates around a few vendors.