The offensive security market has spent a decade running the same play: a curated library of known attack techniques, replayed on a schedule. In Emerging Tech: Agentic Red Teaming Will Separate Offensive Security Platform Winners and Losers (13 July 2026), Gartner notes: “A new class of vendors is building autonomous adversarial agents powered by reinforcement learning and reasoning pipelines.” We feel it’s a useful moment to step back from any single piece of research and look at where the whole category is heading because, in our opinion, the direction.

The market is splitting on one question: reason or replay.

Gartner framing is refreshingly binary: “The red teaming market is splitting into two tiers based on a single technical dimension: whether a platform reasons or replays. Vendors whose platforms use AI reasoning models to autonomously discover novel attack paths are pulling away from vendors whose platforms execute predefined attack techniques from curated libraries.”

Agentic Red Teaming: Gartner’s Trend Description

“Agentic red teaming represents an emerging market in preemptive cybersecurity that consists of autonomous, goal-oriented, context-aware AI entities known as adversarial agents. These agents are designed to independently discover, navigate, and exploit complex attack paths within an enterprise network. Unlike legacy breach and attack simulation (BAS) tools that typically follow static playbooks of known techniques, agentic red teaming focuses on “reasoning-based offense.” These systems leverage AI reasoning models to autonomously create and execute tailored attack playbooks without relying on a central controller or human intervention in every cycle.”

In our opinion, for anyone who has followed Skyhawk’s own research, this will sound familiar. Skyhawk’s Agentic AI Red Team recently demonstrated a full production AWS organization takeover that began with a single low-privilege role. This was an attack built entirely from legitimate, correctly-configured permissions, with no misconfiguration or vulnerability to exploit. A static, point-in-time graph of that same environment showed no viable route. In our opinion, that is precisely the gap Gartner is describing: the difference between validating what’s known and discovering what isn’t.

Why continuous beats point-in-time

Traditional penetration tests are executed at specific intervals. Think of the last time you executed a pen test, how long ago was that test? How much do you think your cloud looks like that now? Additionally, manual penetration tests executed by humans with their binders of specific attack scenarios are prohibitively expensive. This means, to protect budgets, they will only be executed a few times a year if that. It also means the results are not relevant to your security team just a day or two after the test was completed.

At Skyhawk Security, we have long known that continuous is required to secure the cloud. The cloud architecture is constantly changing to meet new business requirements. Unfortunately, security controls do not always keep up. This is why Skyhawk Security introduced our AI-based Purple Team in December 2023, which continuously runs adversarial simulations against a model of the live cloud environment and prioritizes any findings or security gaps based on the business value of the at-risk asset and then tells you what to address so that your security controls align to your cloud architecture. Skyhawk has embraced the Continuous Exposure Management (CTEM) Framework and can help you operationalize your CTEM program for the cloud.

The takeaway for security leaders

In our opinion, Skyhawk Security’s autonomous reasoning, continuous validation, and proven exploitability can help organizations prevent catastrophic cyberattacks. This is clear from our latest announcement where our AI Red Team reasoned it’s way to complete AWS Org take over in seconds. This shifts the questions CISOs and security leaders should be asking from “how many known techniques do you cover?” It’s “can you reason about my environment and show me what an autonomous attacker could actually do inside it, today, and again tomorrow?” Skyhawk Security is prepared to answer these questions.

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

Gartner Report, Emerging Tech: Agentic Red Teaming Will Separate Offensive Security Platform Winners and Losers by Tom Powledge on July 13, 2026.

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