Ethics of Autonomous AI Offensive Agents

Arxiv pdf 2026-07-01T00:00:00
arXiv Paper — PDF not available. Only the Executive Summary is available here. To read or download the full paper, visit the arXiv abstract page.

Abstract

LLM-driven autonomous agents are reshaping offensive security. Unlike traditional penetration-testing tooling - deterministic, narrowly scoped, and operated by trained practitioners - agentic security tools exhibit indeterminacy along three independent dimensions. First, their actions are drawn from a non-deterministic policy whose outputs resist both ex-ante and ex-post explanation, frustrating incident attribution and pre-deployment safety review. Second, their impact is open-ended due to the non-deterministic actions, agency of utilized models, and opaque LLM supply-chains. Third, their user population is indeterminate in both size and required skill: the operating skill floor for using or developing offensive capabilities has dropped sharply.

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