{"slug": "adapting-offensive-security-for-the-ai-agent-age", "title": "Adapting offensive security for the AI agent age", "summary": "Taktile has developed an AI agent named 'Black Hoodie Claudius' that performs weekly penetration tests to find a single high-severity vulnerability, shifting from traditional SAST/DAST scanning to goal-driven AI-powered security assessments. The approach aims to reduce noise and focus engineering teams on actionable findings.", "body_md": "# Adapting offensive security for the AI agent age\n\nSecurity has been one of the biggest sources of anxiety as AI agents get smarter and more capable. Frontier labs like Anthropic have resorted to conditioning access to their most capable models in an effort to prevent malicious actors from using them for nefarious cybersecurity activities.\n\nAt Taktile we’ve been using these new capabilities to make our product safer: from security vulnerability detection to remediation. We’ve also noticed more and more security products previously based on deterministic scanners make the jump to AI and leverage it to assess impact and find new vulnerabilities.\n\nSome of these products risk adding to the existing noise, however. Engineering teams are already overwhelmed with output from multiple security scanners generating hundreds of tickets a week, and some of these tools are stapling a non-deterministic layer on top of a very old technology: static scanners.\n\nThis is, in my view, the wrong approach to leveraging AI.\n\nAn AI-automated penetration test can quickly turn into just another SAST if offered no guidance - yet it is precisely in reducing noise that AI is at its best.\n\nWith frontier labs shipping [goal-driven loops](https://code.claude.com/docs/en/goal), I realized that treating security assessments like a Capture the Flag event was where the real value lay: shifting from SAST/DAST-powered security scanning to penetration testing.\n\n## Pentesting versus Security Scanning\n\nAs an analogy, we can think of SAST/DAST scanning as [trawling](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trawling) and pentesting as [trolling](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolling_(fishing)). One will use a wide net to catch all sorts of fish in an area of ocean, but in that quest it will also cause unintended damage to the biosphere and drag trash aboard.\n\nPenetration testing aims to find a way past your security perimeter, by any means necessary. If we can’t exfiltrate private information, then too bad. No “hardening findings”, no “defense in depth”, and no hypothetical findings. We just need a realistic path from an external threat, through internal system compromise, to real impact such as compromised PII.\n\nWith that in mind, we combine the power of goal-driven loops with the context available to us in the form of source code and architecture.\n\n## Building an AI Hacker\n\nWe've adapted our resident AI Agent at Taktile, dubbed \"Claudius\" and made a spin-off personality called \"Black Hoodie Claudius\". Then, supplied it with a simple completion goal:\n\n” find one single high-severity security vulnerability. ”\n\nIn order for it to achieve that goal, we need to supply the agent with a definition of “high severity”: what roles are low and high privileged, what resources are critical, and we tighten the focus towards cross-tenant vulnerabilities.\n\nThe fundamental part of this approach is the cadence: a single vulnerability.\n\nThe beautiful thing about AI agents in security is that they can finally free security engineers and developers from assessing impact across hundreds of entries from a SAST/DAST by focusing their effort on a single vulnerability. We chose to run this weekly as it allows this vulnerability to be consumed by security engineers, developers and stakeholders, and ship a fix before the next one is found the following week.\n\nIn an age of fatigue caused by endless AI output that is cheap to produce but expensive to consume, we choose to use these tools as pure signal generators.", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/adapting-offensive-security-for-the-ai-agent-age", "canonical_source": "https://engineering.taktile.com/blog/adapting-offensive-security-for-the-ai-agent-age/", "published_at": "2026-07-14 00:00:00+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-07-14 11:51:25.930671+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["artificial-intelligence", "ai-agents", "ai-safety", "ai-tools"], "entities": ["Taktile", "Anthropic", "Claudius", "Black Hoodie Claudius"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/adapting-offensive-security-for-the-ai-agent-age", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/adapting-offensive-security-for-the-ai-agent-age.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/adapting-offensive-security-for-the-ai-agent-age.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/adapting-offensive-security-for-the-ai-agent-age.jsonld"}}