AI is changing how offensive security work gets done, and the pace of that change is not a reason to adopt tooling without judgement. SilentGrid researches and experiments with where AI can genuinely aid or automate part of an assessment, and treats the question as an engineering one rather than a marketing one.
The tests that matter are whether a technique improves coverage, holds up against a client's environment, and can be explained afterwards. Anything that cannot be explained is not evidence.
Safe and controlled before useful
Any implementation reaching client work has to be safe and controlled first. That means being explicit about where data goes, how long it is retained, which jurisdiction it sits in, and whether it is used for training by anyone. Client data does not enter a tool that cannot answer those questions.
It also means keeping a person accountable for the result. A finding is reported because a consultant verified it, not because a model produced it. Where AI assistance contributes to an assessment, its role is described rather than implied, and the limits of the conclusion are stated with the finding.
The basics still apply, especially now
Most weaknesses found around AI systems are not novel. They are the familiar ones arriving through a new component, and the established recommendations still hold.
An agent granted broad permissions is a privilege problem, not an AI problem; least privilege applies unchanged. Credentials in a prompt, a system message or a tool configuration are secrets in code, and belong in a secret store. A model gateway exposed to the internet is an internet-facing application that needs authentication, rate limiting and logging like any other. Content in a vector store is data, subject to the same classification and access control as the source it came from. Retrieval that pulls from a share nobody has reviewed inherits whatever is in that share.
Organisations adopting AI quickly are often asked to think about prompt injection before they have been asked about patching, multi-factor authentication or segmentation. Both matter. The second list is usually where the exposure actually is.