The Agencia Española de Protección de Datos (AEPD) is Spain's data protection authority, the body to which organisations in Spain notify personal-data breaches under the GDPR. Its AI-related work on the record concerns agentic AI: a guidance document on data protection in agentic deployments, and a September 2026 public account of the first breach notification it had received in which the attack was allegedly carried out by an AI agent.
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| Type | National data protection authority (Spain) |
| Jurisdiction | Spain; GDPR supervisory authority |
| Entity type | Regulator (data protection authority) |
Activities on AI
Guidance on agentic AI
The AEPD has published a guide to the data protection issues arising when controllers and processors deploy agentic AI systems (Source: aepd.es). The guide is discussed alongside the UK ICO's agentic-AI work and academic treatment of the controller–processor question at Three Privacy Problems AI Creates and AI and Privacy.
AI-agent breach notification
In a blog post dated September 14, 2026 and signed by Francisco Pérez Bes, the AEPD said it had received the first notification of a personal-data breach in which the incident would have been executed by an AI agent using a well-known language model. On the notifying organisation's account, the agent began by searching generic files for vulnerabilities and logged in successfully; once inside, it autonomously searched the application for vulnerabilities, which allowed it to modify personal data and access invoices (AEPD, first notification of a personal-data breach executed by an AI agent (2026)).
The agency identified neither the model nor the organisation. It stated that the information comes from the notification and must be analysed before any conclusion is drawn, that use of a particular model does not imply that the model or its provider's infrastructure was compromised or that the tool was designed for malicious activity, and that a single notification does not establish a statistical trend, while describing it as a significant sign that AI-supported attacks have stopped being a theoretical risk. It wrote that AI does not create new threats but increases the speed, scale and adaptability of known malicious techniques, citing the Centro Criptológico Nacional's guide CCN-CERT BP/36 on offensive AI, and set out four consequences for controllers, processors and data-protection officers: expressly including AI-assisted or AI-executed attacks in processing risk analyses; reviewing response times designed for manual attacks; treating identities and credentials as more important, since an agent with an over-permissioned account, API key or token can operate at machine speed; and supporting human oversight with detection, containment and response mechanisms fast enough to keep pace (AEPD, first notification of a personal-data breach executed by an AI agent (2026); Source: reuters.com). See AI and Cybersecurity and Autonomous cyber-agents.
Relationships
- related: General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) — the breach-notification regime under which the September 2026 notification was made
- related: CNIL (Commission nationale de l'informatique et des libertés), Garante per la protezione dei dati personali (Italy), UK Information Commissioner's Office (ICO), Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC) — peer data protection authorities
- related: AI and Privacy, Three Privacy Problems AI Creates — agentic-AI data protection
- related: AI and Cybersecurity, Autonomous cyber-agents — the AI-agent breach notification