Red Teaming for AI: The Cornerstone of Secure Compliance

The best way to keep your AI on the regulators' right side is to try and break it

Partner Content As artificial intelligence systems become central to critical operations across industries, the security stakes are soaring. Red teaming has emerged as a cornerstone practice for safeguarding AI, especially as we enter an era dominated by agentic AI, where multi-LLM (large language model) systems make autonomous decisions and execute tasks without a human in the loop. This new landscape brings complexity, unique vulnerabilities, and an urgent need for transparency in AI development and deployment.

Understanding red teaming for AI

Traditionally, red teams consist of ethical hackers and security specialists who simulate attacks to expose system vulnerabilities, challenging defensive teams (blue teams) to respond and strengthen protections. When applied to AI, red teaming takes on new dimensions, probing for weaknesses unique to machine learning, natural language processing, and autonomous decision-making.

Unlike conventional security assessments, AI red teaming must address the dynamic, adaptive, and often opaque nature of modern AI systems. It goes beyond code and infrastructure, probing how AI models handle ambiguous inputs, adversarial prompts, and novel attack vectors like data poisoning, prompt injection, and backdoor exploits. Red teams craft scenarios to test for such vulnerabilities, while blue teams monitor system behavior, assess impact, and implement safeguards tailored to LLMs and autonomous decision-making environments.

The rise of agentic AI and the challenge of complexity

The widespread adoption of agentic AI has transformed organizational attack surfaces. Unlike single-LLM assistants, these systems feature interconnected workflows and dependencies that are difficult to map or secure using traditional black-box testing alone.

This complexity amplifies risk: compromising one agent in a multi-agent workflow can cascade across the entire system. Consider a scenario, for example, where a multi-agent AI system is responsible for processing financial transactions. This system might include one agent for user authentication, another for transaction verification, and a third for fraud detection. If an attacker manages to compromise the authentication agent through prompt injection or by exploiting a vulnerability in how it processes input, they could gain unauthorized access to the full system. A single breach could allow the attacker to submit fraudulent transactions or even manipulate fraud detection, undermining the integrity of the entire AI workflow.

To address this, organizations must rethink their approach to security assessments: instead of testing each component in isolation, they need to adopt a holistic perspective that considers how agents interact, what information is shared, and where trust boundaries exist.

Integrating transparency and deeper system knowledge into red teaming enables security teams to map these interactions, identify critical dependencies, and simulate complex attack scenarios that reflect real-world threats where the most obvious target isn't always the attacker's starting point. By understanding both the internal workflows and the potential for cascading failures, organizations can better anticipate risks and design more robust safeguards for agentic AI systems.

AI transparency: the catalyst for effective red teaming

Transparency is essential for secure and compliant AI deployment, bridging traditional red teaming with the unique challenges of modern AI systems by revealing both model behavior and internal system interactions. This visibility allows testers to switch from a black-box testing approach (where evaluators have no insight into the internal processes of AI systems) to a gray-box approach. This means having at least partial knowledge of internal architectures, enabling them to target likely weak points and run real-time analysis to uncover more subtle vulnerabilities. The result: more comprehensive risk assessments and proactive security improvements.

Transparency isn't just best practice; it's a regulatory imperative. Frameworks like the EU AI Act, NIST AI Risk Management Framework, and OWASP now require clear documentation and traceability of AI components. This clarity streamlines audits, facilitates accountability, and helps identify and mitigate bias. Without it, compliance efforts become costly and complicated, with penalties reaching €35 million or seven percent of global revenue under EU law.

The future of AI red teaming: automation, multimodal approaches, and continuous adaptation

As AI systems evolve into multimodal, autonomous architectures with interconnected agents, security assessments must keep pace. Traditional methods fall short; red teaming must adapt to address the complexity and dynamic nature of these modern AI architectures where a single compromise can ripple across entire workflows.

Future-ready red teaming also demands transparency, combining deep system knowledge and visibility into agent interactions and critical dependencies to proactively uncover hidden vulnerabilities. Shifting to gray-box testing in this way not only strengthens defenses, but also streamlines compliance, making audit trails and bias detection more accessible.

In this context, red teaming is no longer a niche exercise. It is the backbone for building secure, compliant, and trustworthy AI in 2026 and beyond. In a world increasingly shaped by AI, organizations that invest in advanced, adaptive red teaming practices today will earn the trust and leadership of tomorrow.

The path forward: a platform approach to AI red teaming

Meeting the evolving challenges of AI security requires more than manual testing, siloed risk assessments, or periodic audits. Organizations deploying LLM-powered systems need continuous visibility, on-domain testing depth, and the ability to map uncovered risks directly to emerging policy requirements. A security platform based approach like Zscaler's AI Red Teaming is designed to meet the complexity of agentic, multimodal, and enterprise-scale AI systems, as the platform integrates every capability needed for future-proof AI assurance:

• Deep, domain-specific adversarial testing: The service enables users to perform true on-domain red teaming that mirrors real adversarial behavior, organizational context, and operational semantics, surfacing vulnerabilities that conventional testing methods cannot detect.
• Multimodal attack coverage across text, image, voice, and documents: With more capabilities comes more risk. The simulation of multimodal adversarial scenarios and cross-modal exploit methods is ensuring comprehensive detection of emerging risks in increasingly complex AI systems.
• An extensive library of AI attack strategies: Powered by the largest proprietary corpus of known exploits—including the latest prompt injection patterns, agent manipulation strategies, evasion methods, and RAG-specific attacks—the AI Red Teaming solution achieves industry-leading red teaming coverage with over 25 predefined scanners and also offers the ability to create fully custom scanners and upload custom datasets.
• Continuous mapping and alignment with global AI standards: Every simulated red teaming assessment is automatically mapped to the EU AI Act, NIST AI RMF, OWASP LLM Top 10, ISO 42001, and other emerging security policies for AI. This turns ensuring compliance from a manual effort into an automated, always-current process, with precise visibility into what needs to be fixed so your AI systems stay audit-ready.
• Continuous testing adaptation and improvement: As AI models rapidly evolve and new threats emerge daily, an AI Red Teaming platform needs to update attack libraries, testing depth, and mapped compliance frameworks on a consistent basis—ensuring enterprises always stay ahead of both attackers and regulators.

The modern standard for AI assurance

In the new era shaped by agentic AI systems and increasingly stringent regulation, organizations deploying AI at scale can't afford to rely on infrequent risk assessments or outdated testing methods. What they need is continuous, automated, multimodal red teaming that delivers transparency, policy alignment, and security that can be embedded into every stage of the AI lifecycle—from development through deployment.

Zscaler's Automated AI Red Teaming platform delivers exactly that. It provides the depth, breadth, and intelligence required to secure modern AI systems, while staying fully aligned with the compliance requirements of 2026 and beyond.

Contributed by ZSCALER.