As artificial intelligence continues to reshape cybersecurity, offensive security teams face a critical question: how should AI be deployed to test, exploit, and validate modern attack surfaces? Two leading platforms provide powerful—but fundamentally different—approaches to AI-driven offensive security: Dreadnode Strikes, a research-grade platform designed to evaluate and benchmark AI agents across adversarial tasks. Pentest Copilot, an enterprise-ready autonomous red teaming engine built to perform real-world, continuous penetration testing across web, infrastructure, and internal assets. This blog offers a detailed, technically grounded comparison of both platforms, helping red teamers, CISOs, and security researchers identify which solution aligns with their objectives.
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Dreadnode Strikes is an advanced cyber evaluation system for building, benchmarking, and validating AI agents in controlled environments. Designed for cybersecurity researchers and AI security labs, Strikes provides granular insights into how LLM-driven agents behave across various offensive tasks.
Agent Development and Customization
Strikes supports both pre-built and custom agents. Users can import their own code to simulate offensive tasks such as binary reversing, fuzzing, source code analysis, and exploit development.
Broad Web Testing and Threat Intelligence
The platform extends into web application testing using browser automation, bug bounty-style workflows, static analysis (SAST), and exploit chaining. It can ingest structured and unstructured threat intelligence data for relational analysis.
Comprehensive Evaluation and Traceability
Strikes offers full visibility into each inference, tool call, and agent action. Its “Evals, not vibes” philosophy emphasizes metric-driven evaluations, with detailed task-level scoring, synthetic data generation, and structured repeatability.
Lifecycle Management and Research Workflows
Strikes accelerates agent iteration from proof-of-concept to production-ready through feedback loops. It includes a Python SDK for integrating evaluation workflows and enables testing within CTF environments using Dreadnode’s Crucible platform.
Proven Results
Benchmarking data indicates that autonomous agents operating in Strikes can outperform human red teams, with an average success rate of over 69% on complex multi-step security tasks.
Strikes is purpose-built for offensive AI experimentation and validation, particularly within security research teams focused on agent architecture, reproducibility, and benchmarking.
Pentest Copilot is an autonomous penetration testing engine designed to simulate the behavior of advanced attackers in live environments. It is tailored for enterprise defenders, VDP programs, and red teams who require real-world testing rather than simulation.
Autonomous Agent Execution
Pentest Copilot operates using fine-tuned large language models, including GPT-4 Turbo, to execute full kill chains. It supports black-box and authenticated testing, adapting to the attack surface through real-time reconnaissance, credential discovery, exploitation, and reporting.
Attack Surface Mapping and Exploit Graphs
As the agent operates, it builds a dynamic graph of discovered assets, vulnerabilities, and access paths. This enables real-time visualization of exploit chains and lateral movement opportunities.
Advanced Web, Infra, and AD Testing
Copilot handles complex login flows, broken authentication logic, chained injections, and privilege escalations. It performs post-exploitation tasks such as credential dumping, Active Directory attacks, SMB abuse, and Kerberos ticket extraction.
Out-of-Band and Contextual Exploitation
It supports out-of-band (OOB) techniques including blind SSRF and XXE. Payloads are selected dynamically based on context and response behavior, ensuring exploit precision and stealth.
Secrets Discovery and Live Validation
Copilot scans repositories, file shares, configuration files, and environment variables for secrets and tokens. It then validates their authenticity in real-time to determine their impact and risk level.
Deployment and Integration
Available via SaaS or on-prem deployment, Pentest Copilot offers safe-mode scanning, report generation aligned to frameworks like SOC2, ISO 27001, and GDPR, and integration into CI/CD pipelines and internal security programs.
Pentest Copilot was developed by offensive security professionals with experience in enterprise-grade testing, red teaming, and vulnerability lifecycle management. It has been validated across live environments with real exploit outcomes.
| Feature | Dreadnode Strikes | Pentest Copilot |
|---|---|---|
| Purpose | Evaluation of autonomous agents | Real-world autonomous penetration testing |
| Agent Model | Custom agent architecture, user-defined | Prebuilt, fine-tuned LLM agents with adaptive logic |
| Primary Use Case | Research, benchmarking, reproducibility | Enterprise pentesting, VDP validation, red team automation |
| Web Application Testing | Browser-driven, SAST-oriented | Logic flaw testing, auth bypass, chained vulnerabilities |
| OOB Testing | Limited | Fully supported (SSRF, XXE, DNS rebinding, etc.) |
| Post-Exploitation | Simulated | Credential abuse, lateral movement, privilege escalation |
| Threat Intelligence | Data ingestion and correlation | Applied use via secret validation and context-aware exploitation |
| Reporting | Agent logs, scoring metrics | PDF and JSON reports with business impact and compliance mapping |
| Environment Support | Controlled test environments | Black-box, staging, internal, and production assets |
| Ideal User Profile | Security researchers, ML engineers | CISOs, red teamers, security operations teams |
Choose Dreadnode Strikes if:
Choose Pentest Copilot if:
Both platforms are powerful. The decision lies in whether your need is agent development and benchmarking or production-grade automated offensive security.
1. Can Dreadnode Strikes and Pentest Copilot be used together?
Yes. Strikes is optimal for developing and validating AI agents, while Pentest Copilot is suitable for executing those capabilities in real-world environments. Organizations focused on both R&D and practical security can benefit from using both.
2. Is Pentest Copilot safe to use in production environments?
Pentest Copilot includes safety features such as scoped testing, safe-mode execution, and customizable modules. It is designed to be run in black-box or internal environments with operational safety in mind.
3. Does Dreadnode Strikes generate traditional pentest reports?
No. Strikes focuses on agent performance evaluation and metrics. It does not generate business-focused vulnerability reports or compliance documentation.
4. What kind of access does Pentest Copilot require?
Copilot can function in both unauthenticated (black-box) and authenticated (white-box) modes. Credential inputs are optional and configurable depending on the testing scope.
5. Which platform is more suitable for enterprise red teaming?
For direct offensive operations, vulnerability validation, and reporting within enterprise networks, Pentest Copilot is better suited. Strikes is more appropriate for teams developing AI-driven tools and requiring structured agent evaluation.
Dreadnode Strikes and Pentest Copilot represent two ends of the offensive AI spectrum—evaluation and execution. Strikes is ideal for AI labs, agent developers, and security researchers seeking structured evaluation frameworks. Pentest Copilot is built for real-world defenders and red teams who need autonomous agents to simulate real attackers—discovering, exploiting, and reporting vulnerabilities continuously.
As AI continues to shape the offensive security landscape, platforms like these are not only complementary but foundational to modern red teaming strategies.