Most "AI security" tools are thin wrappers around a general-purpose frontier LLM — reasoning capability rented from someone else, applied to a generic scanning workflow. Novee took the opposite path. In this interview, Novee CEO and co-founder Ido Geffen breaks down what it means to own the full AI pentesting stack — the proprietary offensive reasoning model, the harness that coordinates specialized agents, and the training gym where those agents are continuously benchmarked, post-trained on real attacker tradecraft, and promoted into production.
Ido explains why owning each layer matters: it's how Novee's model consistently outperforms frontier LLMs at live browser exploitation, how the platform improves at a rate the customer feels every cycle, how Novee keeps security testing cost-efficient rather than relying on tokenized pricing models, and how new attacker techniques get injected into agent memory the moment Novee's research team observes them in the wild. He then makes the case that owning the model is only half the story. The other half is the Asset Intelligence Model — a living understanding of each customer's environment, workflows, permissions, APIs, and business logic. That's what turns a generalist AI hacker into a bespoke one: not just an attacker that reasons well, but one that reasons well about your specific business. Ido closes with what this compound advantage means for buyers: findings that get more targeted every cycle, remediation tailored to their actual stack, and a platform whose ceiling rises as attackers get faster.
This segment is sponsored by Novee Security. Visit https://securityweekly.com/noveebh to learn more about them!
- 0:00 - Intro: Black Hat 2026 and AI-Powered Penetration Testing
- 0:20 - Using LLM Agents for Offensive Security
- 0:56 - Building Safe AI Models for Pen Testing
- 02:28 - How AI Models and Harnesses Improve Pentesting
- 04:10 - The Novi Gym: Training AI Against Real Enterprise Environments
- 04:53 - Finding Business Logic Vulnerabilities with AI
- 06:16 - Measuring AI Pentesting Success: Precision and Recall
- 07:03 - Comparing AI Agents to Human Penetration Testers
- 09:14 - Where Human Expertise Still Matters in AI Security
- 11:18 - Enterprise Pentesting Teams and AI Automation
- 12:21 - Open Source Tools vs AI Pentesting Platforms
- 13:32 - Benchmarking AI Pentest Performance and Cost
- 13:56 - Optimizing AI Models for Different Security Tasks
- 15:28 - The Future of AI-Driven Penetration Testing
Ido Geffen is the CEO and co-founder of Novee, the leader in AI-powered penetration testing. He brings over 20 years of experience across offensive and defensive cybersecurity, including nation-scale operations, vulnerability exploitation, and defense.
Through his work on national defense, he and fellow Novee co-founders Gon Chalamish and Omer Ninburg saw enterprises facing an impossible challenge: deploying code continuously while testing security only quarterly, even as attackers operate 24/7 with AI-powered tools. They founded Novee in May 2025 to clone their combined expertise into an agent that runs continuously, finding zero-days, business logic flaws, and complex attack chains that traditional tools miss.
