Testing a system the way an attacker actually would
Penetration testing is the practice of deliberately attacking a system probing for injection vulnerabilities, broken authentication, misconfigured access controls before someone with worse intentions does. For AI-driven products, this extends to adversarial testing: inputs specifically crafted to break a model or manipulate its output.
Standard QA is built around expected inputs behaving as expected. Penetration testing and adversarial testing exist specifically to find the failure modes standard testing doesn't look for the malformed request, the prompt injection, the edge case nobody wrote a test for because nobody expected a user to try it.
We test systems and AI models against inputs designed to break them before launch, not after an incident documented in both our AI production case study and our AI agents case study, where adversarial testing covers prompt injection through tool outputs and task descriptions crafted to steer an agent off-scope.