paperJuly 2026Unreviewed

The Ethics of Autonomous AI Agents for Offensive Security

Andreas Happe, Jürgen Cito, Jasmin Wachter

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 \textit{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

Cite

@misc{happe2026ethics,
  title = {{The Ethics of Autonomous AI Agents for Offensive Security}},
  author = {Andreas Happe and Jürgen Cito and Jasmin Wachter},
  year = {2026},
  month = jul,
  eprint = {2607.20255},
  archivePrefix = {arXiv},
  url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.20255}
}