Augustus vs Basilisk

Augustus is a free, self-hosted Go scanner for security professionals assessing large language models. It runs adversarial probes and produces vulnerability reports, with more than 210 probes across 47 attack categories, including jailbreaks, prompt injection, data extraction, safety benchmarks, and agent attacks. It supports 28 provider categories and 43 generator variants, including hosted providers, Ollama, and custom REST endpoints. More than 90 detectors cover approaches such as pattern matching, LLM-as-a-judge, HarmJudge, Perspective API, and unsafe-content detection; seven prompt transformations include encoding, paraphrase, poetry, low-resource-language translation, and case changes. Results can be written as tables, JSON, JSONL, or HTML. The project lists concurrent scanning, rate limits, retries, and timeout handling. Augustus compiles to a portable single binary and can be installed with Go or built from source; the README requires Go 1.27.0 or later. It is Apache 2.0 licensed. The project is intended for authorized security testing, and users are told to test only systems they own or have permission to assess. Provider API use may require credentials.

Basilisk is an open-source framework for authorized security testing, vulnerability research, and academic study of AI and LLM systems. It includes 32 attack modules across eight categories mapped to the OWASP LLM Top 10. Its Smart Prompt Evolution engine combines 15 mutation operators, five crossover strategies, and multi-signal fitness scoring. Multi-turn modules examine prompt cultivation, authority escalation, and sycophancy exploitation, with guardrail drift monitoring. Basilisk connects to providers including OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, xAI Grok, Groq, Azure OpenAI, GitHub Models, and Ollama, plus custom HTTP or WebSocket endpoints. Reports can be exported as HTML, SARIF 2.1.0, JSON, Markdown, or PDF. GitHub Actions and GitLab CI integrations use SARIF output and can fail pipelines on critical findings. Install options include desktop packages for Windows, macOS, and Linux, pip, Docker, and source. The CLI requires Python 3.11 or higher and an API key for the provider being tested. Prompt evolution, payload mutation, and report generation run locally. It is free under AGPL-3.0. Users must have explicit written authorization before testing systems they do not own.