Infosec professionals sour on automated pentesting tools

29% of security pros were open to fully autonomous pentesting last year; now only 9% are

Perhaps bots aren't the answer to everything when it comes to finding flaws. Fully automated pentesting has been a letdown for many security teams, according to offensive security firm Cobalt, as support for the approach has fallen sharply over the past year.

Cobalt’s recent 2026 State of Pentesting report found, among other things, that security practitioners are rapidly ditching autonomous pentesting tools, in large part because they’re simply failing to detect critical vulnerabilities. Cobalt reported that 78 percent of respondents to its survey for the 2026 report experienced “critical false negatives” from automated scanning tools, with the tools quite bad at detecting the sort of vulnerabilities its AI ilk inflicts on environments in which it’s prevalent.

“Automated scanners are brilliant at finding known, signature-based vulnerabilities. But they fail miserably at AI security,” the company...

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