Pentest Swarm AI
The open-source XBOW alternative — but built on a real swarm.
Pentest Swarm AI is a self-hosted, autonomous offensive-security tool. Tools like XBOW proved AI can top the bug-bounty leaderboards — but XBOW is a closed, hosted SaaS: your targets, your findings, and the model all run on someone else's cloud, at their price. Pentest Swarm AI is the alternative you run yourself, and it is more powerful where it counts — because it is built on concurrency and a real swarm instead of one agent grinding down a fixed checklist.
What makes it a swarm (and not a pipeline)
Most "multi-agent" pentesting tools are really a single planner LLM dispatching to specialists in a fixed order — recon → classify → exploit → report. That is a pipeline, not a swarm.
Pentest Swarm AI is built on three swarm-intelligence primitives:
- Stigmergy — agents coordinate by reading and writing findings on a shared blackboard, not by a central planner. A finding's pheromone weight biases other agents toward it and decays over time, so stale paths die naturally.
- Emergence — attack chains appear that no single agent planned. A recon finding wakes the classifier; a high-severity classification wakes the exploit agent; exploit results feed back onto the board and wake the report agent. The order isn't prescribed — it emerges from the blackboard state.
- Decentralization — each agent runs its own trigger predicate. Add a new agent with its own predicate and it joins the swarm without anyone rewriting the orchestrator.
The practical payoff: dozens of agents work your target concurrently. A 1,000-subdomain scope gets worked in parallel — finding vulnerabilities at machine speed. And unlike a scanner that flags thousands of unverified "maybes," the swarm exploits what it finds and proves it with captured evidence, then writes the report.
Who it's for
- Pentesters who want to cover a whole scope overnight.
- Bug bounty hunters racing to first-blood on a fresh target.
- Red teamers who need breadth, fast.
- Security researchers experimenting with autonomous offense.
Safe to leave running
Autonomy is only useful if it's safe to walk away from. Every run is bounded by
four independent guardrails: a hard spend cap (--budget) that stops before
it overspends and still writes the report, a graceful killswitch (a STOP
button in the dashboard, q/Ctrl-C in the terminal), a safe mode that
blocks destructive commands, and scope enforcement that can't be bypassed.
See Cost & Safety.
See it work
Two live views come up as the swarm runs — a web dashboard on
localhost:7777 and a full-screen terminal TUI — with a growing attack
graph, a threat gauge, a detection timeline, and a polished end-of-run report of
the proven attack chains. See Live Views.
Shape the engagement
A scan mode tells the swarm what kind of job it's on —
manual (broad coverage), bugbounty (reportable, deduped, severity-ranked),
ctf (foothold → privesc → flags), or asm (non-intrusive surface mapping).
Bring your own model
Pentest Swarm AI is the harness, not the model. Run it on Claude, anything OpenAI-compatible (including Together AI's hosted Llama / Qwen / DeepSeek), first-party Gemini, or a fully local Ollama / LM Studio — air-gapped, with zero API cost and not one byte of your data leaving your box. The model does the reasoning; the swarm gives it hands: real tools, coordination, scope safety, and evidence-backed reports. See Providers.
Get started
Ready to run it? Head to the Quick Start — one command to install, one to run.
Pentest Swarm AI is for authorized security testing, bug bounty, CTF, and research only. You must have explicit written permission for any target you scan. See the Security & Responsible Use page.