We Are Not Ready for What AI Has Done to Red Teaming
CSO Online, Friday, October 30th, 2026
A red team practitioner argues AI changed offensive security economics, so small teams with frontier models can out-find much larger ones.
The author says the economics of attack changed over the past eighteen months and that a small, well-equipped offensive team using frontier AI can outperform a much larger traditional operation from two years ago.
He distinguishes AI red teaming, which probes LLMs and agentic pipelines for issues such as prompt injection, from red teaming with AI, which uses AI as an operator's tool for traditional offensive work.
He calls the second category the most drastic shift, says AI augmentation is now non-negotiable, and warns of asymmetry between equipped adversaries and defenders relying on manual triage.