The Evolving Role of the Red Team in the Era of Agentic Security

Google's Head of Red Teams outlines how AI is forcing a fundamental transformation in offensive security testing. While the core mission remains preparing organizations for real-world attackers, the threat landscape is shifting toward autonomous agentic attacks that operate at machine speed and scale. 

The post predicts that within 6-12 months, open-weight models will match today's frontier cyber capabilities—enabling industrialized social engineering, automated attack chains, cheap supply chain compromises, and machine-speed exploitation of poor security hygiene. Defenders hold structural advantages (home-field knowledge and first access to defensive tools), but Red Teams must evolve to simulate agentic threats by iteratively building modular AI subagents for reconnaissance, lateral movement, and other attack phases, eventually connecting them via orchestrators for end-to-end autonomous simulations. 

The window to prepare is short, but Red Teams can begin now by automating isolated pieces of manual exercises—treating agentic attacks as a present opportunity rather than a future problem. 

https://blog.google/security/the-evolving-role-of-the-red-team-in-the-era-of-agentic-security

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