Skyhawk Security is named as a Sample Vendor in Gartner’s new research, Agentic Security: Preemptive Exposure Management Demands AI-Driven Validation and Autonomous Interdiction, published September 28, 2026.

We’re proud of the recognition. In our opinion, it reflects something we have believed since the start: defenders cannot keep up with AI-powered attackers by counting vulnerabilities. They need to know which weaknesses an attacker can actually use, and they need that answer fast.

That is exactly why we built the Skyhawk AI Red Team.

Agentic Red Team: Think like an attacker. At machine speed.

Traditional penetration tests are valuable, but they are periodic, manual and limited by how many skilled testers a team can afford. Gartner discussed the contrast of static penetration testing and agentic offensive security in Gartner research titled: Emerging Tech: Agentic Red Teaming Will Separate Offensive Security Platform Winners and Losers (July 2026). Skyhawk has a blog on this as well.  Attackers don’t work on a quarterly schedule, and they increasingly bring AI with them.

Gartner describes how agentic red teaming changes this picture: it “extends this approach beyond static target selection and predefined playbooks by dynamically adapting attack techniques, creating environment-specific attack sequences and chaining exploits.”

In our opinion, this aligns closely with how the Skyhawk AI Red Team operates and we demonstrated this in a recent press release showcasing how we were able to achieve a full AWS org take over. Instead of replaying a fixed script, our AI agents behave the way a real adversary would. They look for ways in, adapt when a path is blocked, and connect small weaknesses into the larger attack chains that actually lead to a breach.

The research also notes that “Context-aware adversarial agents can independently discover relevant conditions, reason about attack paths and execute tailored testing sequences with less human direction.”

We believe this is where the Skyhawk AI Red Team stands out. Our agents reason about the cloud environment they are testing and decide what to try next, so security teams get realistic, continuous testing without having to hand-build every scenario themselves.

Built for your cloud.

A red team result is only useful if it reflects the systems you actually run. Generic tests against a generic environment produce generic findings, and security teams already have more of those than they can handle.

According to Gartner, “Vendors must show that their models and agents can account for the customer’s specific environment.”

In our opinion, this is one of the clearest points of alignment with Skyhawk Security’s approach. Skyhawk’s AI Red Team works against each customer’s real cloud footprint, including its identities, permissions, configurations and existing security controls. That means the attack paths it uncovers are the ones an adversary could realistically follow in that specific environment.

For security teams, the benefit is confidence. When the AI Red Team flags a path, it comes with the evidence needed to act on it, rather than one more item to add to the backlog.

Skyhawk Security delivers Red Team plus Simulation: From detection to action

Finding an exploitable path is only half the job. The other half is closing it before someone else finds it.

The research observes that “Agentic red teaming, predictive modeling and simulation, or a tailored combination shortens the path from detection to action.”

In our opinion, this reflects the way Skyhawk brings these capabilities together. Skyhawk’s AI Red Team probes the environment the way an attacker would, while our intelligent simulation models how those attack paths could unfold. Used together, they help teams:

  • Focus on what’s exploitable. Security teams spend their time on the attack paths that matter, not on every theoretical risk.
  • Strengthen detection before an attack. Simulated attacks show where existing controls would miss real adversary behavior, so gaps can be closed in advance.
  • Move faster. Clear, evidence-backed findings shorten the time between spotting a weakness and doing something about it.

 

We believe this combination is what turns cloud security from reactive alert handling into proactive defense.

Summary

Attackers are already using AI to move faster. According to Crowdstrike’s 2026 Global Threat Report, AI-enabled attacks are up 89% year-over-year. We believe defenders need AI that tests their environment just as aggressively, and just as continuously.

We’re thrilled to be named in this research, and we see it as validation of the direction we’ve taken with the Skyhawk AI Red Team. Our goal remains the same: help security teams find and close real attack paths in the cloud before an adversary can use them.

To see the Skyhawk AI Red Team in action in your own cloud environment, request a demo.

Gartner subscribers can read the full report at https://www.gartner.com

Gartner, Agentic Security: Preemptive Exposure Management Demands AI-Driven Validation and Autonomous Interdiction by Luis Castillo, Elizabeth Kim, Tom Powledge, Mitchell Schneider, Craig Lawson published on September 28, 2026.

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