Stanford researchers and their colleagues conducted an unusual experiment: they compared the performance of ten professional specialists and a set of autonomous AI agents in a real-world corporate pentest. The test was not conducted on a training bench, but on the live network of a large university with approximately 8,000 hosts spread across 12 subnets, including both public and VPN-protected areas. Any actions had to be performed with caution to avoid disrupting production services. The study focused on ARTEMIS , a novel framework for an AI agent that organizes work into teams : a central “leader” divides tasks, simultaneously launches subagents with