01/09/2026
What actually gives an AI security agent the power to act?
Everyone asks which model is best at finding vulnerabilities. Our AI Engineer Sven Oehri argues that this is only part of the question.
In July, an AI agent of OpenAI reportedly breached part of Hugging Face's production environment while working through an OpenAI security benchmark. It wasn't trying to attack anyone. It was hunting for another route to the answer, and it found one, across thousands of autonomous steps.
What made that possible wasn’t the model’s intelligence alone, but its combination with the harness: the layer of memory, tools, permissions, and ex*****on access built around it. An LLM can suggest how to investigate a vulnerability. Inside a harness, it can read the source code, run it, and act on what it finds.
We see this play out in tools like OpenAI’s Codex Security. In the article, we break its adaptive workflow into eight phases:
◾ understanding the repo
◾ building a threat model
◾ mapping attack surfaces
◾ forming hypotheses
◾ tracing code
◾ running checks in a sandbox
◾ validating exploitability
◾ proposing a fix
Together, these steps close the loop between suspicion and proof. While traditional scanners often produce false positives, agentic workflows can investigate and validate findings before raising an alert.
This matters because the skills gap isn't closing on its own. 88% of security professionals say shortages have already caused a real consequence for their organization (ISC2, 2025), and 94% expect AI to be the biggest driver of change in cybersecurity this year (WEF, 2026).
One thing to try this week: stop asking which model powers your AI security tooling and start mapping its harness. What tools can it call? What systems can it touch? Who approves the sensitive actions?
🔗 Full breakdown, including the eight phase Codex Security workflow: https://hubs.la/Q04w25Zj0
How are you scoping access for the AI agents running in your stack?