
# Road to 2026 - what comes next

As we moved into a new year, we want to take a moment to reflect on what we built in 2025 and share where Parrot is heading in 2026.
This isn’t just an announcement, it’s a snapshot of how the project is evolving, what we learned, and what we want to explore next **with your help.**

## 2025: A Year of Change at Scale
2025 was a demanding year for Parrot, both technically and as a community project.

On the release side, we shipped Parrot 6.3 and 6.4, bringing website updates, security improvements, and a wide set of new tools into the distribution, such as Rocket and Caido, while providing major updates to many other tools. John the Ripper, Katana, Subfinder, metasploit, and WPScan are just few of them. These updates continued our focus on keeping Parrot practical, relevant, and aligned with how people actually work.

Parrot 7 marked a much deeper shift. It was a **full system rewrite**, and that came with a cost: much of the development had to happen “in the blind” until the very end, when the first beta could finally be assembled and tested as a whole.

It wasn’t the easiest way to work, but it was **necessary** to reset foundations that hadn’t been touched in years.

At the same time, the project continued to grow:
- **Over 30.000 new followers across social platforms, reaching 136k in total.**
- **More than 2.500 new community members, bringing the Parrot community to over 12.5k people.**
- **The launch of Hack Chirp, a direct community call aimed at involving users earlier in Parrot 7 development and decision-making.**

We also expanded our presence in the wider security and open-source ecosystem, including new collaborations at DEFCON with projects and communities such as Athena OS, Fedora, Red Hat, OWASP, Caido, building together the OS Community.

## 2026 Vision: Understanding AI as an Attack Surface

In 2026, Parrot’s focus isn’t to “jump on AI,” but to understand it properly.

LLM powered chatbots and agents are becoming part of real-world security workflows and, inevitably, part of real-world attack surfaces. Our goal is to study the tools that test and secure AI systems, understand where they fail, and explore how offensive security techniques translate into this space.

This work will include:
- **Researching how AI systems break, misbehave, or get misused.**
- **Prototyping small, practical tools that expose weaknesses or risky behaviors in AI-driven systems.**
- **Sharing market-intelligence insights on how AI is reshaping the pentesting industry from attacker behavior to tooling expectations.**

Being selective and honest about where Parrot can actually contribute, rather than building tools for the sake of trends.
This is exploratory by design: **learning first, impact second.**

## 2026 Release Roadmap

- **Parrot 7 lands at the end of 2025, followed by Parrot 7.1 in February 2026, 7.2 in July, and 7.3 in November.**
- **A new AI tools category will be introduced, including MCPwn, focused on AI-powered offensive security research.**
- **Desktop environments will expand, offering community driven KDE alternatives to our user base.**
- **New categories will be added or expanded.**
- **SCADA and industrial security tooling.**
- **Automotive security frameworks.**
- **Satellite and space infrastructure security.**
- **Parrot containers will become MCP-compatible, improving integration with modern tooling pipelines.**

The goal across all releases remains the same: ship tools people actually use, and keep Parrot adaptable to new domains without bloating the system.

You can make the difference
As you know, **Parrot grows through its community**.

In 2026, we’re opening more of the work to contributors through the Parrot Corsairs program, from content and documentation to package maintenance, testing, and community support. If you want to help shape Parrot and contribute in a practical way, this is where to start!

[button:Parrot Corsairs program](https://www.parrotsec.org/corsairs/)

Parrot is not, and it will never be “just a distro.” It’s a platform, a community, and a space where offensive security, open source, and experimentation meet.

2026 won’t be about moving fast or chasing trends. It will be about learning deeply, building carefully, and staying honest about what works and what doesn’t.

Thanks to everyone who uses Parrot, contributes to it, challenges it, and helps shape where it goes next.

Parrot 2026 Roadmap