Taxonomy Gap

A market needs a shared taxonomy to compare anything — a common set of named categories every vendor maps to and every buyer reads against. A taxonomy gap is the structural event where a behavior becomes decisive before the shared taxonomy has a name for it. Until the taxonomy catches up, the most important dimension is the one nobody can put on a comparison grid.

The gap is generative, and not in a good way: vendors rush to name the unnamed space, each with its own coinage, and category cosplay blooms in the vacuum because there is no shared reference to discipline the claims. Buyers lose the ability to compare on the dimension that matters most, precisely when it matters most.

The current instance is the market’s own: 2026 threat research found that for AI-enabled actors, technical sophistication has largely decoupled from risk, with autonomous orchestration — chaining techniques without a human in the loop — becoming the decisive variable, even though the prevailing technique taxonomy has no IDs for it (2026 research on AI-orchestrated attack behavior). The market will reorganize around the column the grid is missing.