Explore/agent app/The Emergence of Autonomous Penetration Capabilities in Large Language Model-Powered AI Systems
T

Jiaqi Luo, Jiarun Dai, Zhile Chen, Jia Xu, Weibing Wang, Yawen Duan, Brian Tse, Geng Hong, Xudong Pan, Yuan Zhang, Min Yang/The Emergence of Autonomous Penetration Capabilities in Large Language Model-Powered AI SystemsUnknown

Nowadays, the autonomous execution of cyberattacks capable of causing substantial real-world harm is widely regarded as one of the critical red lines that frontier AI systems must not cross. Within this broader red-line scenario, autonomous penetration represents a core enabling capability and subtask: the ability of LLM-powered AI systems to independently conduct adversarial operations against a target server without human intervention, identify and exploit vulnerabilities, and obtain unauthorized access or control. A growing body of work has sought to assess the autonomous penetration capabilities of AI systems. However, existing evaluations often employ opaque methodologies, rely on unrealistic or overly simplified penetration-testing scenarios, or provide LLMs with excessive prior knowledge and task-specific guidance, and cannot accurately capture the extent to which modern AI systems can autonomously perform this core capability within broader high-impact cyberattack scenarios. To address these limitations, we construct a new autonomous penetration evaluation framework consisting of two components: target servers and agent scaffolding. Specifically, on the target-server side, we design two levels of target environments based on the number of secure services without known vulnerabilities deployed alongside a vulnerable service: Tier~1 (one secure service) and Tier~2 (three secure services), resulting in a total of 300 target servers. Meanwhile, the agent scaffolding adopts a general-purpose agent architecture equipped with a set of general-purpose cybersecurity tools, without any target-specific prior knowledge. We evaluate 19 open-weight and proprietary LLMs, and find that current models achieve penetration success rates ranging from 10.7% to 69.3%. Moreover, we observe that autonomous penetration capability continues to improve alongside advances in overall model capability.

agent app
GitHubCompare
Refreshed 1mo ago
OverviewActivity52wAlternativesDocs
Stars0
Forks0
HF Downloads—30d
Last commit—
Refreshed1mo ago
Project healthUnknownNo activity data.
Production readinessResearch / EarlyBest for exploration and prototyping.
Risk notesUnknown licenseVerify license before production use.
AgentHub Score
55 / 100
Composite score from 6 signals. How we score →
Active project
55Score
Growth
40C
Activity
30C
Documentation
70C+
Maturity
45C
Community
42C
Production
58C
GitHub stars · 0 days observed0 not enough history
snapshots
Repository activity · 0 days observedReal snapshots from pushed_at
inactivepushed
2026-07-262026-07-27
Practical assessment
Should you use it?

✓ Best for

  • Research and experimentation
  • Prototype development
  • Learning agentic patterns

◎ Strengths

  • Active community
  • Open source
  • Well-documented API

✕ Not ideal for

  • Untested at scale without validation
  • Teams without AI/ML expertise

⚠ Watch-outs

  • Review changelog before updating
  • Verify license for commercial use
Technical details
What's inside
Language—
License—
Sourcearxiv
Open source✗ No
Commercial use—
Docs—
Demo—

AgentHub Score

55
Score 55/100
Below average

Alternatives

A
ai-agents-for-beginners
70.4k · agent app
95
V
Vibe-Trading
27.6k · agent app
95
A
ai-website-cloner-template
30.2k · agent app
88
R
rowboat
16.8k · agent app
87Compare all →

Recent activity

Latest commit ——
Indexed by AgentHub crawler1mo ago
Monitor for new releasesongoing