Autonomous security company Assail Inc. today launched Sidewinder, a rebuilt version of its Ares offensive security platform that runs on a new 31 billion-parameter model designed to audit its own findings and repair its own mistakes without human intervention.

Sidewinder is a full second-generation redesign of Ares, which Assail introduced in January, with a new interface, a new model and a rebuilt testing harness. The model was fine-tuned on 26 years of practitioner work from Alissa Knight, the company’s chief executive and chief AI officer and a longtime application programming interface hacker.

The release reframes Ares from a scanner that follows a fixed script into a system that plans its own engagements. The previous version, called Dagger, ran every target through the same sequence of phases on a single model and retained nothing once a scan ended. Sidewinder is chat-first and plan-driven, using a fleet of 12 specialized autonomous agents that work against a persistent knowledge graph of a target’s attack surface and rewrite the plan as new evidence surfaces.

The platform now uses vision-grounded analysis to drive a real browser, letting it crawl single-page applications, clear simple challenges and operate several authenticated identities at once. Assail said that approach exposes cross-account, broken object-level authorization and broken function-level authorization flaws that sit in the gap between users.

Each finding is independently verified, deduplicated to a single issue and delivered with a replayable record that includes the agent’s reasoning and a live network trace, according to the company. Attack chains run against live targets, are mapped to the MITRE ATT&CK framework and are rendered as an interactive kill chain that shows how a low-severity foothold escalates to account takeover or data exfiltration.

Customers can run Ares as a managed deployment on Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, or Google Cloud, or fully on-premises through a new Campaign Agent aimed at sovereign and air-gapped environments.

“Pentesting as we know it is broken. It’s expensive, manual and goes stale the moment code changes,” Knight explained. “Sidewinder is turning annual, theoretical testing into continuous, autonomous offensive security. Backed by our advanced 31 billion-parameter model, it chains real exploits the way an adversary would, eliminating false positives and closing the dangerous gap where breaches actually happen.”

Assail argues that traditional scanners and AI penetration testing tools repeat the same logic and the same false positives until a vendor issues a patch. Sidewinder instead reviews its own operations for false positives, missed steps and misclassified findings, then rewrites its own skills and runs repair cycles until the problem is resolved, the company said.

Eric Wood, security and compliance manager at Peregrine Technologies Inc., said that the platform gives his team “continuous validation that keeps pace with how fast our environment actually changes,” replacing what had been point-in-time testing.

Sidewinder is available now. Assail, founded by Knight and headquartered in Boston, will demonstrate the platform at the ISC2 Security Congress in Colorado in October, where it is the event’s Diamond sponsor.

Image: Assail