mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

Mako: A Self-Evolving Agentic Operating System (SE-AOS) for Autonomous Web Exploitation

arXiv 2607.11288 ↗First posted 13 Jul 2026cs.CR cs.AI cs.MAcited by 0

On the map: LLM agents and tool use → Agent threats, guardrails and governance

Abstract (arXiv)

We introduce the Self-Evolving Agentic Operating System (SE-AOS): a new class of AI agent that treats exploit capability as a mutable, versioned kernel it extends at runtime, observing its own failures, synthesising new capabilities, proving them against a live target, and hot-loading them back into itself. Mako is the first SE-AOS instance for security research and the autonomous web exploitation engine developed within LaunchSafe. LaunchSafe builds autonomous security agents for continuous offensive testing and agent-driven security research; Mako is the core engine behind that platform. On the public XBOW validation-benchmarks, 104 containerised, CTF-style web applications spanning 26 vulnerability classes across three difficulty tiers, Mako achieves full-suite coverage: it drives every one of the 104 targets to emit a cryptographically fresh, per-build flag, under a verification regime that makes fabricated or memorised results impossible. Our central result is a law of autonomous exploitation: once a capability exists and is discoverable, difficulty collapses; capability, not reasoning, is what is scarce, together with an architecture and formalism that turn that law into a self-improving system. Mako further runs a gated self-evolution loop that proposes, sandboxes, and commits improvements to its own agents and rules when fitness does not regress. We deliberately withhold the operational results, payloads, exploit chains, and tool source, because a system that reduces full-spectrum web exploitation to a repeatable, machine-speed pipeline is dual-use research of concern. We publish the science; we withhold the weapon.

Key facts. No citing papers in the map yet (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in Agent threats, guardrails and governance, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use. Builds on 16 of its 29 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 13 Jul 2026.

Builds on

16 of 29 references.

Closest ancestors · 3

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2025Multi-Agent Penetration Testing AI for the Web28 Aug
  2. 2024LLM Agents can Autonomously Exploit One-day Vulnerabilities11 Apr
  3. 2024LLM Agents can Autonomously Hack Websites6 Feb

Other references · 13

  1. 2017Attention Is All You Needcited by 59,932
  2. 2022ReAct: Synergizing Reasoning and Acting in Language Modelscited by 8,355
  3. 2023Toolformer: Language Models Can Teach Themselves to Use Toolscited by 4,072
  4. 2023Reflexion: Language Agents with Verbal Reinforcement Learningcited by 4,064
  5. 2023Generative Agents: Interactive Simulacra of Human Behaviorcited by 3,500
  6. 2023Self-Refine: Iterative Refinement with Self-Feedbackcited by 3,317
  7. 2023Voyager: An Open-Ended Embodied Agent with Large Language Modelscited by 2,081
  8. 2024SWE-agent: Agent-Computer Interfaces Enable Automated Software Engineeringcited by 1,628
  9. 2023FrugalGPT: How to Use Large Language Models While Reducing Cost and Improving Performancecited by 791
  10. 2025AlphaEvolve: A coding agent for scientific and algorithmic discoverycited by 763
  11. 2018The Malicious Use of Artificial Intelligence: Forecasting, Prevention, and Mitigationcited by 159
  12. 2023Self-Taught Optimizer (STOP): Recursively Self-Improving Code Generationcited by 128
1 more
  1. 2023PentestGPT: An LLM-empowered Automatic Penetration Testing Toolcited by 94

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  3. 2026Toward Securing AI Agents Like Operating Systems
  4. 2026AgenticOS: An Intent-Oriented Secure Operating System Architecture for Autonomous AI Agents
  5. 2025Systems Security Foundations for Agentic Computing
  6. 2026Tiny Enough to Break In: Agentic Remote Access Trojans Powered by Small Language Models
  7. 2026AWE: Adaptive Agents for Dynamic Web Penetration Testing
  8. 2026SoK: The Attack Surface of Agentic AI - Tools and Autonomy