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Red teaming

AI Red Teaming Cost 2026: Pricing for LLM Penetration Tests

Engagement types, named vendors and an open-source DIY path.

$25K-$75K
One-off engagement band (illustrative)
Quote
Continuous red-team subscriptions
$0
Open-source path with Garak / Promptfoo
2026
Verified pricing

The $25K-$75K band is an illustrative midpoint composed from publicly-discussed engagement sizes. Not a survey average.

Three engagement shapes

One-off audit

Time-boxed engagement. Single report. Two to six weeks.

Continuous red team

Subscription. New payloads land monthly. Lakera Red, Protect AI Recon, CalypsoAI.

Open-source DIY

Garak and Promptfoo scanners. Run in CI. FTE pays the bill instead.

Named vendors

  • Lakera Red (quote only). Continuous AI red-team service.
  • Protect AI Recon (now Palo Alto Prisma AIRS). Quote only.
  • HiddenLayer adversarial-ML red team. Quote only.
  • CalypsoAI Inference Red-Team. Quote only.
  • Promptfoo Enterprise. Custom pricing; open-source Community for self-serve.
  • NCC Group, Bishop Fox, Trail of Bits and other established pentest firms now offer AI engagements.

Illustrative ledger: year-1 AI red-team budget

Mid-market scenario
Illustrative example, not a real company
  1. 01.One external AI red-team engagement (midpoint)$40,000
  2. 02.Two follow-up retests$10,000
  3. 03.Internal eval engineer (0.25 FTE)($240K / yr fully loaded)$60,000
  4. 04.Garak / Promptfoo OSS infra$5,000
  5. 05.Coverage gap remediation$15,000
Year-1 illustrative total$130,000
Illustrative example, not a real company

Pair AI red teaming with traditional pentesting. See pentestingcost.com for the human-pentest cost reference and /llm-security-implementation-cost for the wider year-1 budget.

Last verified June 2026Source: vendor pricing pages. See /methodology.