Can Agentic Code Review Catch Vulnerabilities Before They Are Merged?

Abstract

LLM agents have been increasingly adopted for security-focused code review, but existing benchmarks mostly derive the reviewed changes from their later fixes instead of the real-world bug-introducing commits. In this paper, we present SecPRBench, the first comprehensive benchmark for evaluating agentic security review on validated real-world code changes. More specifically, we have built an automated agentic pipeline to autonomously harvest, build, and validate massive real-world bug-introducing commits for popular software systems. To ensure precise evaluation, we also adopt LLM-as-a-judge to credit the findings matching ground-truth vulnerabilities. To date, we have collected 265 tasks from nine critical systems, including Firefox, V8, and OpenSSL with millions of lines of code. Across eight frontier models, recall ranges from 32.5% to 78.1%, with Grok 4.6 and GPT-6 sol ranking at the top. Our study also shows that most misses are not simply oversights: in 68% of them, the agent reports on a file that holds the flaw but argues for a different mechanism. Security-focused harnesses also behave differently: OpenAI's Codex Security lowers recall by 8.3 points, mostly by abstaining, while Anthropic's Defending Code harness raises it by 7.7 points, at a higher cost.