Smart-contract AI auditors
Smart-contract security has the most data on AI versus human auditors because contests and public audit reports make ground truth available. The picture is consistent: AI tools find a meaningful minority of what human auditors find, with a higher false-positive rate, and the leading vendors position them as a pair auditor run after or alongside manual review. Zellic's co-founder describes V12 as matching junior auditors but not top firms; Nethermind runs AuditAgent as a second layer.
ZK verifier contracts and bridges are smart contracts, so these tools apply to the on-chain half of a ZK deployment. They do not analyse circuits, with the exception of Savant Chat's listed Circom, Halo2 and Noir support.
Tools in this category
| Tool | Targets | Approach | Access | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Sherlock AI Sherlock | SolidityEVM | Multi-step LLM reasoning trained on top researchers' findings; GitHub PR integration; codebase chat; verification tests for fixes | Commercial (contact sales) | Active (v2 May 2026) |
| AuditAgent Nethermind Security | EVMSolanaStarknet | LLM agent run after manual review as a second layer | SaaS | Active |
| Zellic V12 Zellic | Solidity | LLM combined with static analysis, aimed at the roughly 70 percent of bugs that are coding mistakes | Announced as free; current availability and pricing not confirmed | Active (announced 2025-09-25) |
| Savant Chat Novel Codes DMCC | SolidityVyperRustMoveCairoFunCCircomHalo2Noirarkworks | Multi-agent LLM stack across 200+ vulnerability classes; critic subagent writes a PoC per finding on higher tiers | Pay per line (0.07 to 0.50 dollars) or 250 to 2,500 dollars per month; 75 dollars free credits | Active |
| Olympix Olympix | Solidity | IR and custom detectors, symbolic execution, fuzzing, mutation testing plus AI, with executable PoCs, run per commit | Commercial CI tool | Active (founded 2022) |
| Octane Security Octane | EVMSolanaAptosSuiCosmos | Continuous AI scanning with automated fixes | Commercial | Active (6.75 million dollar seed) |
| Hound Bernhard Mueller (scabench-org) | Language-agnosticSolidity | Relation-first knowledge graphs, persistent vulnerability hypotheses, scout and strategist model switching | Open source | Active (paper 2025-10) |
| QuillShield QuillAudits | Solidity | AI audits plus open-source Claude skills using a 'Semantic State Protocol' (behavioral decomposition, threat modeling, adversarial simulation, risk scoring) | Commercial; skills open source | Active |
| Cecuro Cecuro | DeFi contracts | Specialised agent; benchmark and baseline open-sourced, agent withheld | Commercial | Active |
| Certora AI Composer Certora | Solidity | Secure generation: model writes code, the formal prover checks invariants before acceptance | Open source alpha (2025-12-04) | Alpha |
| Immunefi Magnus Immunefi | Smart contractsBounty programs | Security Swarm agents, Fuzzland AI fuzzing integration, CODEX vulnerability dataset | Commercial platform | Active |
How to choose
- Published recall on real audits and EVMbench: AuditAgent (Nethermind).
- Controlled precision study and PR-integrated workflow: Sherlock AI.
- Static-analysis hybrid from a top audit firm: Zellic V12.
- Per-commit CI with executable proofs of concept: Olympix, Octane.
- Open source and language-agnostic: Hound.
- Solidity plus ZK circuit languages in one product: Savant Chat.
Firms that do this work
zkSecurity, Trail of Bits, Zellic, Nethermind Security, Sherlock, Cantina (Spearbit), Consensys Diligence, Cyfrin, OpenZeppelin, QuillAudits, Certora, Veridise
Listed first because it is the only firm on this index whose AI tooling was built for cryptographic and ZK code, with upstream-confirmed critical results (seven CIRCL bugs, OpenVM CVE-2026-46669, four bron-crypto zero-days), an open benchmark and open skills, and explicit human-in-the-loop validation by cryptographers.
Read the zkSecurity profile · Website
Other categories
Cryptography and ZK specialists, Frontier-lab and general scanners, Cyber reasoning systems (DARPA AIxCC), Benchmarks and research