AI code audit report template: the sections a paid audit has to deliver

What an AI code audit report is for

A code audit report does three jobs at once. It tells a non-technical buyer whether the product is safe to ship, sell or raise money on. It tells the engineers exactly what to fix and in what order. And it leaves a record that a later reviewer, an investor's technical advisor or a SOC 2 auditor can check against.

AI-generated code changes the emphasis, not the format. The common failure modes we see are the same ones the OWASP Top 10:2025 lists near the top: broken access control, security misconfiguration and supply chain problems from dependencies nobody chose on purpose. Add to that a class of problem that is specific to generated code: features that work in the demo path and silently do nothing in the edge cases, and requirements that were never implemented because the prompt that built the feature never mentioned them.

So a good report answers two questions, not one. Is the code safe? And does the code do what was asked? The second is a requirements audit, and the client usually does not know to ask for it.

The seven sections clients expect

The OWASP Web Security Testing Guide recommends four top-level sections for a security test report: Introduction, Executive Summary, Findings and Appendices. Lenny Zeltser's widely used assessment report template splits the same material into eight. We use seven, because a code audit also has to cover what the code does, not only how it can be attacked.

The order matters. Executives read the first page and the table. Engineers go straight to section 5. If either group has to hunt, the report has failed at its job.

1. Executive summary

Write it last and keep it to half a page. State what was audited in one sentence, give the verdict in one sentence ("the application is not ready for paying customers until the two critical findings are fixed"), then the counts by severity, then the two or three themes that explain most of the findings. Name one thing the codebase does well; it makes the rest credible. No payloads, no CVE numbers, no tool names here.

2. Scope and exclusions

List each repository and the commit hash you audited, the branches, the environments you had access to, and the dates. Then the exclusions, with reasons: third-party services, infrastructure you could not see, mobile apps out of scope, anything the client asked you to leave alone. A scope section that only lists what was in scope will be read as a guarantee about everything else.

For AI-generated code, add one line about provenance: how much of the codebase the client believes was generated, by which tools, and whether a human reviewed it before merge. You will not be able to verify this precisely, so write it as the client's statement.

3. Method

Name the tools and their versions (the SAST scanner, the dependency audit, the secrets scanner), the manual review checklist you followed, and the severity model. If you used an AI assistant to help with the review, say so and say what it was allowed to do. Reference the standards you drew on: the OWASP Top 10:2025 for category names, the CVSS v4.0 qualitative scale for severity, and OWASP ASVS 5.0.0 if the client needs a verification level named. A client who later hires another firm should be able to compare the two reports.

4. Severity table

One row per finding. We use the CVSS v4.0 qualitative bands because they are public and nobody argues about them: Critical is a score of 9.0 to 10.0, High is 7.0 to 8.9, Medium is 4.0 to 6.9, Low is 0.1 to 3.9. Add an Informational level for things that are not vulnerabilities but will cost the team later, such as a missing test suite or an unmaintained dependency.

The rows above are illustrative examples of the shape, not findings from a real engagement. The categories in the third column are the OWASP Top 10:2025 names, so the client can look them up.

5. Findings with evidence

Each finding gets the same fields, in the same order, every time. The WSTG lists them: a reference ID, a title, likelihood, impact, a risk rating, a description of the issue and how it can be exploited, step-by-step remediation, and optionally reproducible artifacts such as a curl command so the developer can confirm the fix. We add two fields for AI-generated code:

• Where it came from. The file and line, and whether the pattern repeats elsewhere. Generated code copies its own mistakes; one unchecked tenant ID is usually five.
• Why it probably happened. Not to assign blame, but because the fix is often in the prompt or the template, not only in the code. "The route handler was generated without a workspace scope because the instruction did not mention tenancy" tells the team how to stop producing the same bug.

Evidence means something the client's engineer can run. A screenshot of a scanner result is not evidence; the request that returned another tenant's data is.

6. Remediation plan

Turn the findings into work. Order them by severity, then by how many other findings a fix closes. Give each an owner on the client's side, a target date and a verification step ("re-test F-01 with the two-tenant script in Appendix B"). Distinguish between fix now, fix before launch and fix within the quarter. A plan with no dates is a list.

7. Sign-off

Who performed the audit and their qualifications, who on the client's side accepted the report and when, what re-testing is included in the fee, how long the report stays valid (we say the commit, not a date), and the confidentiality terms. If the client will show the report to a third party, say which version: most buyers only need the executive summary and the severity table, not the reproduction steps.

A copyable Markdown skeleton

Paste this into your docs tool and fill it in. The section labels are written as bold text so they do not collide with the headings of whatever page you paste it into.

**Audit report: <product name>**
Version 1.0 · <date> · Prepared by <firm> for <client> · Confidential

**1. Executive summary**
Scope in one sentence. Verdict in one sentence.
Findings: <n> critical, <n> high, <n> medium, <n> low, <n> informational.
Themes: (1) ... (2) ... (3) ...
What works well: ...

**2. Scope and exclusions**
Repositories and commits: <repo>@<sha>
Environments: ...
Dates: <start> to <end>
Provenance (client's statement): ~<x>% generated with <tools>, reviewed by ...
Out of scope: ... (reason)

**3. Method**
Tools and versions: ...
Checklist: <link>
Severity model: CVSS v4.0 qualitative scale + Informational
AI assistance used during review: yes/no, for ...

**4. Severity table**
| ID | Finding | Category (OWASP Top 10:2025) | Severity | Status |

**5. Findings**
F-01 <title>
Severity: ... Likelihood: ... Impact: ...
Location: <file:line>, also at ...
Description: ...
Evidence (reproducible): ...
Why it probably happened: ...
Fix: step 1, step 2 ...
References: ...

**6. Remediation plan**
| Order | Finding | Owner | Target date | Verification |

**7. Sign-off**
Audited by: ... Accepted by: ... Date: ...
Re-test included: ... Valid for commit: ...

The hosted code audit checklist template is the review-side companion: it is the list you work through before you have anything to put in section 5.

How to produce the report in five steps

1. Fix the scope in writing before you start. Commit hashes, environments, exclusions. Send it to the client and get a reply. Everything in the report refers back to this.
2. Run the automated passes first and triage them. SAST, dependency audit, secrets scan. Most of what they return is noise; the report should only contain what you confirmed by hand, with the scanner output in an appendix.
3. Do the manual review against a checklist. Authentication, authorisation on every route, input handling, payments and webhooks, data export and deletion, background jobs. For AI-generated code, also read the prompts, templates and rules files if the client has them; they explain the patterns you will find.
4. Audit requirements, not only code. Take the PRD or the original brief, list each requirement, and mark it implemented, partial or missing. Generated codebases are often complete for the happy path and absent for everything the prompt did not mention. Put the gaps in the severity table as Informational or higher, depending on what the client promised customers.
5. Write the findings, then the plan, then the summary. In that order. The summary is a compression of the findings; writing it first produces a summary of your assumptions.

How we run this on Atrix

We write the report as a page in Atrix, not a Word file, because the report and the remediation work need to live next to each other. The page holds the seven sections; each row of the remediation plan is an issue in a cycle with an owner, a due date and the verification step in its description. When an engineer closes F-01, the plan updates, and the re-test is a second issue, not a reminder in someone's inbox.

The client gets a share link to the page, so they read the current version and the comments stay in one thread. Version history shows what changed between the draft and the accepted report. When the engagement closes, Markdown export gives the client a file they own.

One limit worth stating plainly: Atrix's AI agent does not scan code. Its audit feature is a requirements audit, which checks what was built against a frozen requirements baseline and reports coverage and drift. That is step 4 above, and it is useful. Steps 2 and 3, the scanners and the human reading of the auth and payment paths, happen in your SAST tooling and your reviewers' heads. If a client wants a human code audit from us rather than the software, that is the agency's work, not the product's; see how we approach code audits with AI for where AI helps in the review and where it misleads.

FAQ

What should an AI code audit report include?

Seven sections: an executive summary, scope and exclusions, method, a severity table, one entry per finding with reproducible evidence and a fix, a remediation plan with owners and dates, and a sign-off. For AI-generated code, add provenance to the scope and a requirements coverage check to the findings.

Which severity scale should a code audit report use?

Use a public one so clients can compare reports. The CVSS v4.0 qualitative scale, published by FIRST, rates 9.0 to 10.0 as Critical, 7.0 to 8.9 as High, 4.0 to 6.9 as Medium and 0.1 to 3.9 as Low. Add an Informational level for non-vulnerability findings such as missing tests or unimplemented requirements.

How long should a code audit report be?

As long as the findings need and no longer. A two-week audit of a small SaaS typically produces a half-page executive summary, a one-page severity table and five to twenty finding entries of half a page each. Scanner output and raw tool logs go in appendices, not the body.

Should the client get the full report or just a summary?

Both, as separate documents. The full report goes to the client's engineering lead. A short version with the executive summary and the severity table, and no reproduction steps, is what they can forward to a buyer, investor or auditor.

Does an AI code audit replace a penetration test?

No. A code audit reads the source; a penetration test attacks the running system. They find overlapping but different things. Most SOC 2 buyers ask for a penetration test within the last twelve months; a code audit is what you do before that, so the test finds less.

How is an AI code audit different from a normal code audit?

The format is the same. The emphasis shifts towards access control that is missing rather than wrong, dependencies nobody chose, patterns repeated across many files, and requirements that were never implemented because the prompt did not mention them. The report should say how much of the code was generated and check the requirements as well as the security.

Next step

Work through the hosted code audit checklist before you write section 5, and see how agencies run client work in Atrix with the report as a page, the fixes as issues and the client on a share link. Pages and whiteboards cover co-editing, version history and Markdown export.

Sources

Report structure and finding fields: OWASP Web Security Testing Guide, Reporting Structure and Lenny Zeltser's security assessment report template. Severity bands: CVSS v4.0 specification, FIRST, Table 22. Category names: OWASP Top 10:2025. Verification levels: OWASP ASVS 5.0.0, published 30 May 2025. All checked in October 2026.