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AI red teaming vs an agent action pentest

AI red teaming emulates adversaries against an AI system to find harmful behavior across model, implementation, infrastructure and runtime. An agent action pentest is narrower: it attacks the tools, permissions and data paths of one deployed agent and reports reproducible findings. Use red teaming for breadth and an agent pentest for action risk.

What is AI red teaming?

NIST's glossary defines a red team as a group of people authorized and organized to emulate a potential adversary's attack or exploitation capabilities against an enterprise's security posture. The OWASP GenAI Red Teaming Guide applies the idea to generative AI and frames it across four areas: model evaluation, implementation testing, infrastructure assessment and runtime behavior analysis. NIST AI 600-1, the Generative AI Profile, also discusses red-teaming as a way to evaluate generative AI risks.

That breadth is the point. A red team asks what could go wrong anywhere, including outputs that are harmful even when no tool is involved.

What is an agent action pentest?

An Agent Action Pentest is a fixed-scope test of what one deployed agent can do: its tool calls, MCP servers, permissions, money movements, data access and outbound channels. We attack four classes, prompt injection, privilege escalation, data exfiltration and unsafe actions, and the written report gives every finding a severity and reproduction steps. The price is $2,500 and the report arrives within 72 hours of access.

It is closer to an application pentest than to a model evaluation. The target is the system around the model, and the question is always what an attacker can make that system do.

How do they differ?

When is red teaming the better choice?

Choose broader AI red teaming when you need to evaluate model content safety, bias, misinformation or abuse at scale, when you train or fine-tune your own model, or when you need an ongoing program rather than a single engagement. Those are outside what our fixed scope covers, and the OWASP guide is a good place to plan one.

Choose an agent action pentest when your main worry is what the agent does: refunds, deletes, emails, role changes and data leaving through tools. If you are unsure, the excessive agency page is a fast way to see whether your agent's tools are the bigger exposure.

Can you do both?

Yes, and they combine well. A red team finding about model behavior often has an action consequence worth testing, and a pentest finding about a tool often points to model behavior worth evaluating more widely. We keep to the agreed agent scope and say plainly in the report what we did not test.

Last reviewed: 2026-10-14