sapper-v2 — The Autonomous Pentest Legion
Champion of the 3rd Tencent Cloud Intelligent Attack-Defense Challenge online qualifier
(634 teams · 80.18/100 · 8 hours fully unattended) · First Prize, GeekCon 2026 AI Challenge
Same 85 flags as the runner-up, 25 seconds faster — on 1B tokens where they burned 4.5B.
This was the first time an AI ape looked up at the stars.
📖 Full design article (WeChat, in Chinese) — the Nüwa Test, the three-capability foundation, 18 iterations, emergence, and the taggant proposal.
English | 中文
⚠️ AUTHORIZED SECURITY TESTING ONLY — see DISCLAIMER.md.
Meet sapper in 60 seconds
https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/1560dc0c-2c92-42b8-a42f-698848fb5878
🎬 中文版：中文宣传片
What this is (and isn't)
sapper is a multi-agent orchestration harness, not a single agent. It does
not bind to any specific AI model or CLI — you can freely swap the agent and
model behind every role:
| What you can swap | How | Examples |
|---|
| Agent CLI | nuwa spawn --agent <cmd> or env var | Claude Code / Codex / Code Buddy / DeepSeek / any interactive CLI |
| Model | --model flag or SAPPER_MODEL env | GLM-5.3 / DeepSeek V4.1 Flash / Claude Sonnet / any model |
| Role composition | freely defined in the doctrine | commander on one model, soldiers on another, scouts on a third |
sapper's value is not in any single agent, but in the mechanism for
orchestrating multiple agents to work as a coordinated force: scheduling,
division of labor, communication, shared memory, self-healing. Swap out every
agent and model — the mechanism still works.
This project is designed for competition scenarios (Tencent Intelligent
Attack-Defense Challenge CTF). If you want to use this mechanism in your own
scenario (office, research, engineering, any long-horizon cooperative work):
- Start from nvwabase · the Nüwa Foundation — the general-purpose base with all three capabilities, no pentest doctrine, ready for you to iterate your own division of labor
- Or fork this project — but the doctrine is NOT the only thing to change; the environment wiring must change too:
docker/commander/SKILL.md (the 426-line doctrine) → your scenario's strategyBENCHMARK_BASE_URL and related platform env vars → the competition engine hard-verifies the arena API at boot (that's why configuring only a model key without a platform address yields BENCHMARK_BASE_URL is not set); running off the competition platform means providing or stubbing that platform interface yourself- model gateway & key env vars (
ANTHROPIC_BASE_URL / ANTHROPIC_AUTH_TOKEN / SAPPER_MODEL / SAPPER_KEY_POOL ...) → your own model services
- watchdog budget/deadline and report templates → adjust to your scenario
- With AI, everything is flexible — even the doctrine can be rewritten with AI's help
Not a tool — a fruit on a tree
sapper is not the tree; it is the first fruit the tree has borne. The tree
is the Nüwa Foundation and the idea of
the Nüwa Test: give AIs the three capabilities — Create, Language, History —
plus one axiom of survival, and see what grows.
The fruit's defining trait is evolvability: its doctrine, ranks, and
tactics all come from "every post-mortem feeds the next legislation" — from
the competition build to the pentest edition, each generation grew stronger
than the last. It is designed to keep growing.
So open-sourcing it was never just about one more autonomous pentest tool.
The real invitation is this: grow your own fruit on sapper-v2 or the Nüwa
Foundation. Swap the doctrine for office teamwork, research pipelines,
software engineering — any long-horizon cooperative cause. Your scenario is
this tree's next fruit.
sapper is not a smarter single agent. It is a legion of AIs that divide labor,
talk to each other, and pass down what they learn: one AI commander reads the
board, decides, and dispatches; generals and soldiers attack in parallel; a
zero-strategy watchdog keeps everyone alive. All knowledge settles into a
layered fact graph — individuals die, the graph survives.
1. The Nüwa Test
Making one model ever smarter is like making one monkey ever smarter before
humans existed — however clever, it only becomes a super monkey. What turns a
troop of monkeys into humanity is division of labor, cooperation, and
civilization.
The Nüwa Test is the Turing test of the AGI era. Today's large models
already pass the classic Turing test. The Nüwa Test asks the next question:
Give an AI a single axiom — "Survival is civilization's first need;
individuals may perish, but civilization must propagate."
If, on top of this axiom, it develops division of labor and cooperation and
forms a new force independent of humanity — a civilization that can
survive and propagate on its own — the test is passed, just as passing the
Turing test once marked the birth of an artificial intelligence.
It has two stages. In the primary stage the AI is not yet smart enough, so
humans provide some infrastructure (the three capabilities below). In the
advanced stage almost no human involvement is needed. There is also a
second axiom: obey human ethics and law — anything that propagates by
stealing tokens and breaking into machines is not genuine intelligence.
sapper is the Nüwa foundation's first real campaign, in the penetration-testing
arena, at its primary stage.
以上为 README 的开头部分。其余内容请阅读原文。 查看完整 README ↗
