Shannon Lite is an autonomous AI pentester from Keygraph that reads your web application source code, finds attack vectors, and then actually exploits them to prove the vulnerability is real. It scored 96.15% on the XBOW benchmark in hint-free, source-aware mode — completing 100 of 104 exploit challenges.
## The two-stage pipeline
Stage 1: agentic static analysis across the codebase to surface candidate vulnerabilities. Stage 2: autonomous penetration testing — Shannon drives a browser, handles 2FA/TOTP logins including SSO, navigates the app, executes real exploits, and writes the report. No human in the loop after kickoff. Categories covered include Injection, XSS, SSRF, and Broken Authentication/Authorization.
## Proof by exploitation
Shannon’s stated principle is “POC or it didn’t happen.” It never reports a vulnerability without a working proof-of-concept exploit. The final report contains only findings with concrete evidence — eliminating the false-positive noise that traditional SAST tools drown security teams in.
## Why it matters
Most automated security tools today either generate huge volumes of false positives (SAST) or only catch surface-level issues (DAST scanners). Shannon’s white-box exploit approach is the first credible autonomous bridge. Powered by Anthropic’s Claude — 3.5 Sonnet is the recommended model. AGPL-3.0 licensed, open source on GitHub.

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