AI Pen Testing Killed Traditional DAST

The Application Security Podcast · Aug 31, 2026 · 43m

Is traditional DAST finally dead? James Berthoty came back to settle the argument that his last episode started. James is the founder and analyst behind Latio, and he argues that AI pentesting is a genuinely different animal — payloads generated with context about your actual application, agents that chase findings the way a human tester would, and results a scanner was never going to produce. We get into what it costs once tokens enter the picture, who pays for them, whether a pentest on every pull request is realistic, and what stops an autonomous tester from going further than it should…