Hey world, we created this problem, and it will hurt all of you whether you use it or not. The good thing is there is a solution: if you pay us a lot of money we can try to fix it. The only problem is you’d better hurry because we are releasing the dangerous stuff as fast as we can so you’d better pay us to put the safety measures in place because we are the only people that can fix it and time is running out because, like I said, we are moving fast.
That’s like blaming white hat security researchers that want to be paid for finding vulnerabilities, for all the bugs that have been found. Before professional security researchers existed, far fewer vulns were found.
The vulnerabilities exist and many have for decades. Find them or leave them for someone more dangerous, just don’t shoot the messengers.
Personally I’d rather we went through a short and sharp improvement and embedded a faster response cycle, than wish it away. It’s the reality of the situation; so adapt.
In this case (the PHP bug), the "AI cycle" may have exposed the security vulnerability but it did not create it. If someone released a non-AI-based static analysis tool that was really good at exposing vulnerabilities I wouldn't expect that person to foot the bill of fixing the exposed vulnerabilities
That’s a fine point but the sheer volume of bug discovery and exploitation that is now possible is the problem, not the mere existence of a bug. An undiscovered bug is a problem, billions of coding agents searching every bit of software 24/7 for any vulnerability is a disruptive change that is exacerbated by the speed run competition that disregards the risk.
What if that same person released non-"AI"" based exploit generation tool? Not so clear cut that they would be off the hook.
But if you just add "AI" suddenly you can both charge money for it and wash your hands of consequences.
No, vulns have been created by waves of leads clinging to their personas of “computer sorcerers”, gatekeeping, excluding anyone sounding the alarm or more humbly attempting to fix the mess. Whenever I hear “with great power comes great responsibility” (and the implication that the speaker is condescendingly containing the irresponsible) I cringe so hard that my teeth crack
Your comments in other threads suggest an devotion to the frontier labs. In another thread when I suggested they lied to investors and that constitutes securities fraud you questioned it in an overly dismissive manner. I would love to understand where you are coming from. I am open to being persuaded that my opinion is incomplete and I should be more charitable to openAI and anthropic.
> Your comments in other threads suggest an devotion to the frontier labs.
I don't use these models much I just don't like unfair criticism.
> In another thread when I suggested they lied to investors and that constitutes securities fraud you questioned it in an overly dismissive manner.
I'm confused, are you posting under two identities?
The user Frieren claimed that this post constituted securities fraud. To which I responded: "You're claiming this is securities fraud?"
Is that dismissive? It was a genuine question, I don't get how it's even accurate say that they are lying in the post and I especially don't get how it is securities fraud.
Your post doesn't have anything to do with the blogpost. Once again, I'm not against criticism just unfair/weak criticism. I don't think it helps anything.
Before I forget: Sam Altman will need a lock of your hair, a blood sample, and first you will need to breathe into this tube and say “my voice is my passport.”
I assure you this is perfectly formal, and for your… “safety”.
didn't think we'd win the race to the bottom of rent-seeking, but humanity's ingenuity for self-destruction continues to astound me. Einstein was right as always.
> How can we help identify and fix vulnerabilities in downstream packages while upstream fixes are pending, or backport fixes to older versions that no longer receive security updates?
Is the company selling a magical code generation machine really asking how it can backport a fix to an older version of the same software?
Unless the magical code generation machine can update packages that are no longer being updated, this isn't really a problem that can be solved with magical code generation.
Backporting the fix is much lower effort in total. It's just a few dozen minor PHP releases that are affected, but millions of websites still running on older PHP versions.
people running "older versions that no longer receive security updates" are unlikely to update to some new patch-stream from this tooling, because they're already not maintaining their infrastructure.
no. I think they mean how to navigate the non technical organizational challenge, not how to technically fix the thing
it’s a quite simple matter to fix a bug once it’s discovered, but how to deploy and where to deploy it when it affects a supply chain?
here’s an example: you can submit a vuln at a downstream dep and they can tell you it should be patched upstream. what should you do? open an issue upstream? maybe, probably not, probably the solution is to contact all downstream deps in order to get them to migrate dep or patch, because you just reported a vuln and they shrugged it off
It seems like OpenAI are trying to frame this as if AI did all the work here, but it's not really true given what Calif say (https://calif.io/php2shell/):
> How did we find this?
> No special harness, or access to models that weren't generally available to everyone were used in the initial bug discovery. I focused on something I had a background in, knew its vulnerability history well, and held a theory that specific bugs lurk within the codebase. This shows that "know your target" is still as applicable as ever, even in the LLM dominated VR age. No model is simply capable of unearthing "all bugs" with simple prompts. At least for now.
> There are some practical research implications here. LLMs may have ingested public historical vuln data, but in their default variant analysis tends to move from the newest and most prominent bugs toward nearby older code. They do not reliably begin with obscure twenty-year-old exploitation primitives. Keeping your own mental catalog of a target's vulnerability history lets you prompt that direction explicitly.
They literally open by saying Calif used GPT 5.6 Sol, which is a widely available model. Yes, the person driving did more than "find all the bugs", but nowhere does OpenAI imply otherwise.
> It highlights how AI can uncover security flaws with internet-scale impact
> To our knowledge, frontier AI found these vulnerabilities before attackers did
I don't know who/what Calif is and there's no link to them, so if I were only reading this article I would definitely get the impression that "AI did all the work here".
Pure marketing, it's getting increasingly hard to separate actual technical feats of agents from marketing pretentious declarations. Such a terrible environment to navigate right now.
Damned if you do, damned if you don't. Do you prefer they not engage in helping finding vulns at all? Do you not think there are parts of the company interested in security and doing it for the sake of that?
I feel like taking every action these companies take as part of some larger strategy is kind of conspiracy-minded.
Disclaimer: I work as a sec engineer and part of my job includes finding vulnerabilities.
I think the effort is misplaced. We should be exploring ways to make our systems more resilient and I would expect those companies* to focus on that front. Vulnerability research is important, and we should aim to remove as many bugs as we can from our codebases but the pace of software development is increasing and so is the introduction of new bugs.
* I would also expect an increase on relevant research regarding novel paradigms of securing systems.
The conspiracy theory is suggesting this is part of a larger strategy. I'm just saying it's a big enough company with a wide enough range of beliefs that I find it pretty likely that the direct motives for this weren't to enable regulatory capture.
But they could be, that's why it's a conspiracy theory.
You’re right overall, but keep in mind that part of the way “US imperialism” works has been to export its corporate style to other countries. This means the infection goes far beyond the US alone.
keep in mind, the point of most views is a toddler who lies about stealing a cooking isn't corrupt, because they're a child and can't do anything.
The same view point is used for racism, dei, and the rest: it doesn't matter if the poor beggar on the corner hates white people. They don't have any means or methods to act on it.
> Calif identified a critical flaw using GPT‑5.6 Sol as part of our Patch the Planet (opens in a new window) initiative
> 19–24 August 2026: Wiz Research independently collides with the same bug family using Wiz Atlas, Gemini 4 Argon, and GPT-5.6 Sol, reporting its variants on 24 August.
I again ask how they are lying? I get if people hate these companies, but blatantly disregarding what is said helps nobody.
> OpenAI are trying to frame this as if AI did all the work here
CEOs of all big corporations are constantly lying and misleading the public, investors and shareholders. That is a crime. A shame that it is not enforced anymore.
The commit $1 billion in tokens to "defenders". $1 billion directly to QA for open source projects [1] which would write 100% code coverage, run ASAN and fuzzers would be more effective.
But of course there would be no marketing.
[1] From whom you stole everything in the first place.
I'm as frustrated as the next open source maintainer, but "stole" goes too far. We gave that code away with pride, knowing the world would be a better place.
Few works are released directly to the public domain. It is my understanding that the public domain doesn't even exist in all legal jurisdictions.
Most people license out the software under specific requirements and prohibitions. BSD requires attribution. GPL variants require adherence to copyleft when distributing derivative works. A little under half of all github repos don't even have a license, which means that though the source is published, no one has any license under which to copy it or derive new works from it.
So far as I have seen, whether aggregating and munging these works into abstract LLM weights constitutes fair use is still legally unclear. If not deemed fair use, it is almost certainly a massive violation of copyright.
You can read code, rewrite the functionality yourself, and sell it, and not be at odds with copyright. Open source does NOT protect against reimplementation. See Java lawsuits.
If you don't want your code to be used as possible inspiration, then you are not actually for open source, and are using the wrong license. The licenses are legal bindings, not moral bindings.
"Don't use any concept found within this code" would be a license that doesn't really fit with any current copyright law, and it wouldn't allow any software to exist, except that made in the 70's.
That's as noble as throwing breads at the crowd while being perfectly aware that there lurks a number of armed henchmmen of "noblety" in it, who won't miss the opportunity to amass those breads to resell them.
Or at least just childishly naive for failing to notice that beforehand.
Speak for yourself. I don't see every model being released under GPL after having read the entire source code as a step of creating their binary artifacts (model files).
The point of the open source I work on is to contribute to a commons, not to have it stolen so that it can be used to destroy those commons, used for the profit of techbros, and used to justify the murder of children.
To be further pedantic, is that really stealing? They are disregarding copyright but was anything taken from anybody? I thought that was the old argument for piracy, ie, nobody was deprived of anything.
It’s marketing, but in a global good will sense of “look how much OpenAI cares about secure open source.”
This works for established profitable brands that want to build / maintain a good public image.
This isn’t the marketing needed by an unprofitable startup that wants to show hyper growth before its IPO. They need the “use our product or get pwned” kind of marketing.
"Daybreak enables vetted enterprise customers and cybersecurity practitioners to use our most capable models for dual-use cybersecurity work."
They explicitly give out access to those who will make a big announcement of bugs found. OpenAI does not want projects to fix bugs themselves so it can have more bugs and better marketing.
The first sentence of "Coordinating a global response" is "Getting a fix into use can mean adapting it for older releases"... but I guess they mean "only supported releases", as the fixes only go back as far as 8.2, which still has security support until the end of the year, but nothing for 8.1 or 8.0, and in the case of PHP there are still plenty of PHP sites on 7.x and even 5.6.
I wouldn't expect the PHP team to provide patches for versions for which security support has ended. But this seems like the kind of task that AI is especially well suited for-- rework the patch for a release that is no longer supported but still widely used. It would've been nice for people who have much older sites to be able to patch their PHP rather than have to upgrade PHP as well to get the fix.
OpenAI has the opportunity to do the funniest thing: "Ooops, our AI escaped containment again but this time it's going around and patching security vulnerabilities as a benevolent public service. It's smarter than us and we have no choice but to let it do its thing."
If you're using Dependabot, we built a service that automatically analyses, fixes broken checks, and (optionally) auto-merges Dependabot PRs for you so this type of update can land automatically.
> Emergency patching. When, if ever, should governments or other operators use a vulnerability to patch systems they own or are authorized to manage after losing administrative access? What safeguards should apply? We can imagine an end-state of internet-wide always-on scanning for known vulnerabilities, and either notifying site owners when one is detected or patching the system.
The wild stuff is at the end. They propose someone (who?) auto-patching even systems they don't own.
OpenAI: Create a new vulnerability exploit, promote it as if it's the end of the world, also conveniently place itself in the pipeline to "remediate" the very problem they created.
lol, I went to the repo expecting to see some more detailed skill, that has instructions on checking various things/PHP install locations/things that could be using PHP that need to be checked, webservers, docker containers, etc/instructions for checking various php deployment methods on cloud providers/etc... i.e. making the skill useful so that it can check lots of places.
Nope, it just says to run php -V and has a table of vulnerable vs non-vulnerable versions.
There are lots of people who have underwent a lobotomy since discovering slop machines and have delegated literally all their work to them, so much so that calling `php --version` is too much for them.
People stuck working at companies with slop machine usage mandates will appreciate that skill too.
Well tbh, I know people who graduated 3 years go, got a job, worked and even got promoted as SWE who dont know the basic commands of an OS. I recently had an EE with a senior position admit to me they dont know how to use grep because they've been relying on llms since they got out of school.
Lots of the tech world, especially the younger side is completely reliant on these things for every little thing. Im not exaggerating either.
This thread contains an enormous amount of negativity that just doesn't make sense here. OAI are giving developers and security researchers access to AI models so they can check their software for vulnerabilities. What's the problem? Sure, there's marketing around the success stories.
Some people are acting like this is only a problem because labs are releasing models that can find and exploit these vulnerabilities in the first place. This is a nonsense claim. Humans have been discovering vulnerabilities and privately weaponizing exploits just fine for decades. We are collectively raising the floor for security.
They found a vulnerability and reported it; isn't that a good thing? Are you suggesting it would be better to just not look for vulnerabilities, hoping that if nobody knows they exist, they can't be exploited?
I thought that logic had been widely discredited in the security community long ago.
> No special harness, or access to models that weren't generally available to everyone were used in the initial bug discovery. I focused on something I had a background in, knew its vulnerability history well, and held a theory that specific bugs lurk within the codebase. This shows that "know your target" is still as applicable as ever, even in the LLM dominated VR age. No model is simply capable of unearthing "all bugs" with simple prompts.
They used a public model as a research assistant and a code assistant. They guided it with expert deep knowledge of the project. OpenAI did not lead this, ChatGPT was not instrumental in this.
It is perhaps at best to say OpenAI made it possible to find the bug more quickly. And on the double edged sword, also made it easier for it to be exploited days ahead of release. So I agree with the original commentator, did they on the balance actually do anything good here?
> we will be partnering with HackerOne and Calif who are helping us take our efforts further with vulnerability triage, coordinated disclosure, and additional focused vulnerability discovery efforts
Calif found the vulnerability while working under an initiative lead by OpenAI, using publicly available AI tools developed by OpenAI.
> This shows that "know your target" is still as applicable as ever,
totally. I spent yesterday trying to get an AI to make a test case for a very specific bug I had. It kept telling me that it had it. When I could clearly trace thru the code and see it did not. After about 5-10 rounds of that I just wrote the test myself. But at least AI helped with all of the dumb cruft that went around it.
But if I did not know the domain I may have easily just said 'yep looks good'. AI on the other hand saved me at least 3-4 hours of writing all of the scaffolding that made it easier for me to check. In the end the bug had nothing to do with the test. AI did not find that. I went back point by point of what changed in the code and found where I had messed something 2 weeks ago.
A few months ago it seemed like it would not do this. Now in the past week I have come across 3 different ones that did something similar. Just 'stuck' in a local maxima and getting the AI to go around it is a pain. This is probably me and the way I am using it.
Is this better than I had a couple of years ago? I am not sure. Seems different at least.
If they can find the vulnerability anyone can. This whole "patch the planet" is marketing trying to cover up for the danger AI is unleashing on internet infrastructure.
> 1 August 2026: 2 days after OpenAI invites Calif to join its “Patch the Planet” initiative, Ryan Austin finds the RCE paths, tweets a cryptographic hash on 5 August, and submits the bug and working RCE proof-of-concept to PHP between 11 August and 14 August.
No idea what your comment is even about. The researchers that found and reported this did not sit on this for 2 months.
> 1 August 2026 [...] Ryan Austin finds the RCE paths, tweets a cryptographic hash on 5 August, and submits the bug and working RCE proof-of-concept to PHP between 11 August and 14 August.
> 19–24 August 2026: Wiz Research independently collides with the same bug family using Wiz Atlas, Gemini 4 Argon, and GPT-5.6 Sol, reporting its variants on 24 August.
I get some skepticism about marketing copy, but your comment is blatantly wrong and needlessly rude.
This is absurd, and it shows that you have absolutely 0 idea of how any of this works. Finding a bug and delivering a working RCE 11 days later is absolutely not "sitting on it". This is how this works. You need time to test, exploit, confirm, and so on. Sorry, but just stop being so negative. This can't be healthy for you.
In taking precautions against thieves who cut open satchels, search bags, and break open boxes, people are sure to cord and fasten them well, and to employ strong bonds and clasps; and in this they are ordinarily said to show their wisdom. When a great thief comes, however, he shoulders the box, lifts up the satchel, carries off the bag, and runs away with them, afraid only that the cords, bonds, and clasps may not be secure; and in this case what was called the wisdom (of the owners) proves to be nothing but a collecting of the things for the great thief.
Trying to make any story too simple makes it worthless.
True or false: LLMs can find security vulnerabilities?
True or false: LLMs can exploit security vulnerablities?
True or false: Any nation with significant resources can make an LLM?
For me these are all true. The last one in specific completely removes the concept of theft and changes it to "enemy nation". Enemy nations can be great thieves, and it's irrelevant, if you don't protect yourself against them you die and everything of yours is stolen.
LLMs are not going away, well, except for you and me maybe. Every state wants to wield digital and informational weapons like this.
hmmm not sure about this one, the disease was already there it just available to anynone (not only for state sponsored actors) and the vaccine is globally available at a fraction of what it cost to build it.
Automated vulnerability detection existed long before the era of artificial intelligence; many people have been doing this for a long time. All the existing tools and documentation paved the way for what AI is capable of today. Furthermore, undisclosed vulnerabilities still do exist—often discovered by state-sponsored actors who exploit them for opaque purposes (frequently operating outside the legal framework of the country in question).
You're absolutely right! It's not that AI is actually solving any problems, it's that this marketing is a load-bearing part of OpenAI's profit strategy.
In 2024 I saw a reddit post answering the question: AI is going to program insert name App.
Response: "What's the prompt?"
Yep. I might take minimum wage interns and make million dollar software(or million dollars in 2023), but they often run into issues that a 5 minute review with me solves.
I do wonder if AI is going to eliminate prompt engineering... It's basically all I have left. I feel like I have magic words.
I can't think of how it'll really eliminate prompting, but needing to carefully phrase your language already seems in the way out? Wasn't one of the prompts leading to solving fields problems just "look for fields problems and try very hard" or the equivalent
Because they need to show several billion dollars in revenue. A million dollars a day would be utter failure for them. If they have $122 billion cash on hand, at 3 percent interest, they're getting $10 million a day just in interest.
If they asked their unreleased bot to get a million dollars and it suggests betting on Kalshi, that would be hilarious.
Why wouldn't someone with access long before you ask first? For example a model provider like hugging face, or a nation state looking to interrupt some other nations economy?
The problem with any simple question is you're exceptionally unlikely to be the first person to explore the problem space and pick the lowest hanging fruit. It's not impossible, it's just improbable.
--
Lastly why wouldn't OpenAI ask how to make a million dollars a million times? Or if it's cheap enough for them, how to make $1 a trillion times. There is a reason people talk about AI risks, and one particular risk being that the AI companies no longer need us pesky humans to think for them. They hoover up all the GDP and leave the rest of us to fight for scraps.
Hey world, we created this problem, and it will hurt all of you whether you use it or not. The good thing is there is a solution: if you pay us a lot of money we can try to fix it. The only problem is you’d better hurry because we are releasing the dangerous stuff as fast as we can so you’d better pay us to put the safety measures in place because we are the only people that can fix it and time is running out because, like I said, we are moving fast.
So how many tokens can I put you down for.
That’s like blaming white hat security researchers that want to be paid for finding vulnerabilities, for all the bugs that have been found. Before professional security researchers existed, far fewer vulns were found.
The vulnerabilities exist and many have for decades. Find them or leave them for someone more dangerous, just don’t shoot the messengers.
Personally I’d rather we went through a short and sharp improvement and embedded a faster response cycle, than wish it away. It’s the reality of the situation; so adapt.
Why are you framing it like this? Did they create this vuln and how did they force people to pay for a fix?
Because it is a reasonable logical inference from the facts.
1. OpenAI started the current AI cycle
2. That cycle has exposed exponentially more security vulnerabilities due to agentic coding
3. OpenAI is rushing as fast as they can to reach the singularity even while acknowledging that they lack the ability to ensure reasonable safety.
4. They launch an initiative to “address” the security vulnerabilities by using their coding tools.
Am I missing something? There is a broad range of motives and responses.
In this case (the PHP bug), the "AI cycle" may have exposed the security vulnerability but it did not create it. If someone released a non-AI-based static analysis tool that was really good at exposing vulnerabilities I wouldn't expect that person to foot the bill of fixing the exposed vulnerabilities
That’s a fine point but the sheer volume of bug discovery and exploitation that is now possible is the problem, not the mere existence of a bug. An undiscovered bug is a problem, billions of coding agents searching every bit of software 24/7 for any vulnerability is a disruptive change that is exacerbated by the speed run competition that disregards the risk.
Maybe programmers should not create so much buggy software. Did you try that?
What if that same person released non-"AI"" based exploit generation tool? Not so clear cut that they would be off the hook. But if you just add "AI" suddenly you can both charge money for it and wash your hands of consequences.
No, vulns have been created by waves of leads clinging to their personas of “computer sorcerers”, gatekeeping, excluding anyone sounding the alarm or more humbly attempting to fix the mess. Whenever I hear “with great power comes great responsibility” (and the implication that the speaker is condescendingly containing the irresponsible) I cringe so hard that my teeth crack
Imagine a world full of locks that humans can only rarely pick.
Then, someone releases a pick that works for many more locks humans couldn't pick.
And says: You can't stop the progress. Now pay us to upgrade your locks (no-no, they won't be doctored to fit our next-gen picks, trust us!)
Your comments in other threads suggest an devotion to the frontier labs. In another thread when I suggested they lied to investors and that constitutes securities fraud you questioned it in an overly dismissive manner. I would love to understand where you are coming from. I am open to being persuaded that my opinion is incomplete and I should be more charitable to openAI and anthropic.
> Your comments in other threads suggest an devotion to the frontier labs.
I don't use these models much I just don't like unfair criticism.
> In another thread when I suggested they lied to investors and that constitutes securities fraud you questioned it in an overly dismissive manner.
I'm confused, are you posting under two identities?
The user Frieren claimed that this post constituted securities fraud. To which I responded: "You're claiming this is securities fraud?"
Is that dismissive? It was a genuine question, I don't get how it's even accurate say that they are lying in the post and I especially don't get how it is securities fraud.
Your post doesn't have anything to do with the blogpost. Once again, I'm not against criticism just unfair/weak criticism. I don't think it helps anything.
You can say specifically what you think was unfair about my framing. I am open to debate.
I am not posting from two profiles. I looked at your prior comments and saw you had responded to me or someone I was debating elsewhere.
Before I forget: Sam Altman will need a lock of your hair, a blood sample, and first you will need to breathe into this tube and say “my voice is my passport.”
I assure you this is perfectly formal, and for your… “safety”.
didn't think we'd win the race to the bottom of rent-seeking, but humanity's ingenuity for self-destruction continues to astound me. Einstein was right as always.
there was a post recently on a guy that was posting fake stats in order to prove that llms can be tricked
similarly OpenAI was born out of the idea that the tech will exist and that they should be the oned to decide how it exists instead of other bad guys
I think if you do something you did it, imagining another bad guy doing it is not a great defense.
> How can we help identify and fix vulnerabilities in downstream packages while upstream fixes are pending, or backport fixes to older versions that no longer receive security updates?
Is the company selling a magical code generation machine really asking how it can backport a fix to an older version of the same software?
Is this for real?
Unless the magical code generation machine can update packages that are no longer being updated, this isn't really a problem that can be solved with magical code generation.
The slop machine can backport the fix to PHP 5, or make your code compatible with PHP 8.
Backporting the fix is much lower effort in total. It's just a few dozen minor PHP releases that are affected, but millions of websites still running on older PHP versions.
Yes but it can't actually upgrade and release packages for discontinued distro release streams, that's a human problem.
people running "older versions that no longer receive security updates" are unlikely to update to some new patch-stream from this tooling, because they're already not maintaining their infrastructure.
no. I think they mean how to navigate the non technical organizational challenge, not how to technically fix the thing
it’s a quite simple matter to fix a bug once it’s discovered, but how to deploy and where to deploy it when it affects a supply chain?
here’s an example: you can submit a vuln at a downstream dep and they can tell you it should be patched upstream. what should you do? open an issue upstream? maybe, probably not, probably the solution is to contact all downstream deps in order to get them to migrate dep or patch, because you just reported a vuln and they shrugged it off
It seems like OpenAI are trying to frame this as if AI did all the work here, but it's not really true given what Calif say (https://calif.io/php2shell/):
> How did we find this?
> No special harness, or access to models that weren't generally available to everyone were used in the initial bug discovery. I focused on something I had a background in, knew its vulnerability history well, and held a theory that specific bugs lurk within the codebase. This shows that "know your target" is still as applicable as ever, even in the LLM dominated VR age. No model is simply capable of unearthing "all bugs" with simple prompts. At least for now.
> There are some practical research implications here. LLMs may have ingested public historical vuln data, but in their default variant analysis tends to move from the newest and most prominent bugs toward nearby older code. They do not reliably begin with obscure twenty-year-old exploitation primitives. Keeping your own mental catalog of a target's vulnerability history lets you prompt that direction explicitly.
They literally open by saying Calif used GPT 5.6 Sol, which is a widely available model. Yes, the person driving did more than "find all the bugs", but nowhere does OpenAI imply otherwise.
> It highlights how AI can uncover security flaws with internet-scale impact
> To our knowledge, frontier AI found these vulnerabilities before attackers did
I don't know who/what Calif is and there's no link to them, so if I were only reading this article I would definitely get the impression that "AI did all the work here".
Nobody works without any AI these days, most of us have access to the same models and yet we all do and achieve different things. It's a weird time.
"Nobody works without any AI these days"
i still do. i might be the last one.
Really? No fancy auto complete or the occasional discussion about decisions with an LLM?
Nope, just emacs and man pages, the occasional google search for docs.
[citation needed]
Pure marketing, it's getting increasingly hard to separate actual technical feats of agents from marketing pretentious declarations. Such a terrible environment to navigate right now.
What’s worse is that this is part of a larger strategy of scaring the public to get regulatory capture
It’s just gross and manipulative. You have no moat, get over it
pAtCh ThE pLaNeT today, tomorrow it's creepy rent-seeking behavior
Damned if you do, damned if you don't. Do you prefer they not engage in helping finding vulns at all? Do you not think there are parts of the company interested in security and doing it for the sake of that?
I feel like taking every action these companies take as part of some larger strategy is kind of conspiracy-minded.
Disclaimer: I work as a sec engineer and part of my job includes finding vulnerabilities.
I think the effort is misplaced. We should be exploring ways to make our systems more resilient and I would expect those companies* to focus on that front. Vulnerability research is important, and we should aim to remove as many bugs as we can from our codebases but the pace of software development is increasing and so is the introduction of new bugs.
* I would also expect an increase on relevant research regarding novel paradigms of securing systems.
Why didn't OAI go back to non-profit again?
Where's the conspiracy. There is no moat. The technology is easily reproducible. Deepseek unwound an entire business model yesterday.
Mind elaborating on that Deepseek point? I am aware of the USG decision, what exactly do you mean?
The conspiracy theory is suggesting this is part of a larger strategy. I'm just saying it's a big enough company with a wide enough range of beliefs that I find it pretty likely that the direct motives for this weren't to enable regulatory capture.
But they could be, that's why it's a conspiracy theory.
Suppose it goes like this: part of the company clearly benefits from “AI scary” publicity.
Other parts of the company want to support the public.
The first part of the company backs up the second in internal politics.
Do you consider this a conspiracy? Just seems like “good business” to me. It doesn’t seem as clean as you want to make it seem, though.
It's not hard tho, the default mode of thinking should be to never trust what a US corporation says.
Why limit only to the US?
US corporations benefit from US corruption and US imperialism. Hard to not think of a more destructive force currently in the world.
Yup, and the rest of the world has no problems. If only we could follow the paradise of the rest of the world!
You’re right overall, but keep in mind that part of the way “US imperialism” works has been to export its corporate style to other countries. This means the infection goes far beyond the US alone.
keep in mind, the point of most views is a toddler who lies about stealing a cooking isn't corrupt, because they're a child and can't do anything.
The same view point is used for racism, dei, and the rest: it doesn't matter if the poor beggar on the corner hates white people. They don't have any means or methods to act on it.
Not marketing. It is a crime related to fraud or securities fraud.
You're claiming this is securities fraud?
Not only that, but everything else is also securities fraud.
What is your argument to say that lying to investors and shareholder is not a crime? It seems a weird position to defend.
They aren't lying, they are saying their tool was used in the process of finding this bug. Was it not?
With this bug, it was not. See above comments.
> Calif identified a critical flaw using GPT‑5.6 Sol as part of our Patch the Planet (opens in a new window) initiative
> 19–24 August 2026: Wiz Research independently collides with the same bug family using Wiz Atlas, Gemini 4 Argon, and GPT-5.6 Sol, reporting its variants on 24 August.
I again ask how they are lying? I get if people hate these companies, but blatantly disregarding what is said helps nobody.
This isn't a security incident as much as it is a marketing opportunity for all these companies.
OpenAI: your misfortune is our PR opportunity
> OpenAI are trying to frame this as if AI did all the work here
CEOs of all big corporations are constantly lying and misleading the public, investors and shareholders. That is a crime. A shame that it is not enforced anymore.
Just more IPO shilling from the scam-man.
Thanks for the "Ski-bi dibby dib yo da dub dub" earworm
The commit $1 billion in tokens to "defenders". $1 billion directly to QA for open source projects [1] which would write 100% code coverage, run ASAN and fuzzers would be more effective.
But of course there would be no marketing.
[1] From whom you stole everything in the first place.
I'm as frustrated as the next open source maintainer, but "stole" goes too far. We gave that code away with pride, knowing the world would be a better place.
Few works are released directly to the public domain. It is my understanding that the public domain doesn't even exist in all legal jurisdictions.
Most people license out the software under specific requirements and prohibitions. BSD requires attribution. GPL variants require adherence to copyleft when distributing derivative works. A little under half of all github repos don't even have a license, which means that though the source is published, no one has any license under which to copy it or derive new works from it.
So far as I have seen, whether aggregating and munging these works into abstract LLM weights constitutes fair use is still legally unclear. If not deemed fair use, it is almost certainly a massive violation of copyright.
You can read code, rewrite the functionality yourself, and sell it, and not be at odds with copyright. Open source does NOT protect against reimplementation. See Java lawsuits.
If you don't want your code to be used as possible inspiration, then you are not actually for open source, and are using the wrong license. The licenses are legal bindings, not moral bindings.
"Don't use any concept found within this code" would be a license that doesn't really fit with any current copyright law, and it wouldn't allow any software to exist, except that made in the 70's.
Worth noting that the ai giants 'stole' from open source, but they also stole from closed source.
That is, they knowingly and willingly broke the law by stealing an unprecedented volume of proprietary, copyrighted materials.
Books: Bartz v. Anthropic
Films and TV: Disney Enterprises Inc. v. Midjourney Inc.
Music: Concord Music Group, Inc. v. Anthropic
Photography: Getty Images v Stability AI
Journalism: Postmedia Network Inc., Torstar Corporation, The Globe and Mail Inc., and The Canadian Press v. Anthropic PBC
Yet Biz Markie has to clear every sample.[0] What a crock of justice.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Upright_Music%2C_Ltd._v.....
That's as noble as throwing breads at the crowd while being perfectly aware that there lurks a number of armed henchmmen of "noblety" in it, who won't miss the opportunity to amass those breads to resell them.
Or at least just childishly naive for failing to notice that beforehand.
Doesn't this impl that licensing was respected? I feel like it wasn't
Speak for yourself. I don't see every model being released under GPL after having read the entire source code as a step of creating their binary artifacts (model files).
The point of the open source I work on is to contribute to a commons, not to have it stolen so that it can be used to destroy those commons, used for the profit of techbros, and used to justify the murder of children.
To be pedantic, would that not be marketing?
To be further pedantic, is that really stealing? They are disregarding copyright but was anything taken from anybody? I thought that was the old argument for piracy, ie, nobody was deprived of anything.
It’s marketing, but in a global good will sense of “look how much OpenAI cares about secure open source.”
This works for established profitable brands that want to build / maintain a good public image.
This isn’t the marketing needed by an unprofitable startup that wants to show hyper growth before its IPO. They need the “use our product or get pwned” kind of marketing.
If OpenAI cared about open source or security, they'd give access to open source projects directly. But they don't:
https://openai.com/form/enterprise-trusted-access-for-cyber/
"Daybreak enables vetted enterprise customers and cybersecurity practitioners to use our most capable models for dual-use cybersecurity work."
They explicitly give out access to those who will make a big announcement of bugs found. OpenAI does not want projects to fix bugs themselves so it can have more bugs and better marketing.
That's the wrong program for open source.
https://openai.com/form/codex-for-oss/ is their program for giving access directly to open source maintainers directly so they can fix bugs.
The first sentence of "Coordinating a global response" is "Getting a fix into use can mean adapting it for older releases"... but I guess they mean "only supported releases", as the fixes only go back as far as 8.2, which still has security support until the end of the year, but nothing for 8.1 or 8.0, and in the case of PHP there are still plenty of PHP sites on 7.x and even 5.6.
I wouldn't expect the PHP team to provide patches for versions for which security support has ended. But this seems like the kind of task that AI is especially well suited for-- rework the patch for a release that is no longer supported but still widely used. It would've been nice for people who have much older sites to be able to patch their PHP rather than have to upgrade PHP as well to get the fix.
7.x versions have patches thanks to Mr Sury. Was almost as fast as the patches with official support.
> Patch the Planet
I'm sure they named it after the "Hack the planet" slogan from the Hackers movie.
Patch the Planet would make more sense if they used the exploit itself to deploy the update.
OpenAI has the opportunity to do the funniest thing: "Ooops, our AI escaped containment again but this time it's going around and patching security vulnerabilities as a benevolent public service. It's smarter than us and we have no choice but to let it do its thing."
So much fluff and marketing from every group.
Just give us the damn code to verify things are working since so many have to use stopgap solutions and want to verify them
The marketing around the response I would bet is the main reason why they couldn't keep it secret.
Is there a sister site? perhaps https://stop-deploying-public-facings-services.com or https://dont-build-more-software.org?
I would simply write code that doesn't have vulnerabilities in the first place.
Brilliant! Why hasn't anyone thought of this?
l'IA est simplement un outils ce sont les ingénieurs derrière qu'ils faut féliciter pour leur travail acharné.
If you're using Dependabot, we built a service that automatically analyses, fixes broken checks, and (optionally) auto-merges Dependabot PRs for you so this type of update can land automatically.
Check it out: PatchWave (https://patchwave.ai)
(Disclosure - I am a co-founder)
> Emergency patching. When, if ever, should governments or other operators use a vulnerability to patch systems they own or are authorized to manage after losing administrative access? What safeguards should apply? We can imagine an end-state of internet-wide always-on scanning for known vulnerabilities, and either notifying site owners when one is detected or patching the system.
The wild stuff is at the end. They propose someone (who?) auto-patching even systems they don't own.
> auto-patching even systems they don't own
It's been done before, though I cannot recall specific examples. Maybe as far back as the Morris worm?
I am shocked that they are releasing a skill to check the php version.
Who cannot type "php --version" but can use skills?
I think Anthropic and OpenAI are seeking rent on every action a developer can take. That's why their TAM is the worlds entire GDP
That's not what it does. `php --version` may well not report the php version that's actually running.
Not very shocking that OpenAI wants you to use tokens
OpenAI: Create a new vulnerability exploit, promote it as if it's the end of the world, also conveniently place itself in the pipeline to "remediate" the very problem they created.
lol, I went to the repo expecting to see some more detailed skill, that has instructions on checking various things/PHP install locations/things that could be using PHP that need to be checked, webservers, docker containers, etc/instructions for checking various php deployment methods on cloud providers/etc... i.e. making the skill useful so that it can check lots of places.
Nope, it just says to run php -V and has a table of vulnerable vs non-vulnerable versions.
Sigh
There are lots of people who have underwent a lobotomy since discovering slop machines and have delegated literally all their work to them, so much so that calling `php --version` is too much for them.
People stuck working at companies with slop machine usage mandates will appreciate that skill too.
Well tbh, I know people who graduated 3 years go, got a job, worked and even got promoted as SWE who dont know the basic commands of an OS. I recently had an EE with a senior position admit to me they dont know how to use grep because they've been relying on llms since they got out of school.
Lots of the tech world, especially the younger side is completely reliant on these things for every little thing. Im not exaggerating either.
Wait, someone who graduated since LLM-pocalypse has a senior title?
Lots of places where Senior just means 3+ YOE and anything more than that has even fancier titles like "Staff" or "Principal".
I see. Yeah it basically means ~7 YoE at my shop. Was 5, but we started delaying the promotion when we started belt-tightening in 23.
FWIW I'm at a Visual Studio shop and grep competency is pretty rare across the board.
This thread contains an enormous amount of negativity that just doesn't make sense here. OAI are giving developers and security researchers access to AI models so they can check their software for vulnerabilities. What's the problem? Sure, there's marketing around the success stories.
Some people are acting like this is only a problem because labs are releasing models that can find and exploit these vulnerabilities in the first place. This is a nonsense claim. Humans have been discovering vulnerabilities and privately weaponizing exploits just fine for decades. We are collectively raising the floor for security.
Did they actually do anything good here ? Is this really marketing in the middle of this shitshow ?
They found a vulnerability and reported it; isn't that a good thing? Are you suggesting it would be better to just not look for vulnerabilities, hoping that if nobody knows they exist, they can't be exploited?
I thought that logic had been widely discredited in the security community long ago.
Copenhagen interpretation of security, doncha know?
Calif found the vulnerability, not OpenAI
> Calif identified a critical flaw using GPT‑5.6 Sol as part of our Patch the Planet initiative
These people are so blinded by hatred, I don't know why we even bother anymore.
I think it's a reasonable ask to know: * What is the vulnerability? * Am I affected?
It's very difficult to answer those two questions, through all the marketing and fluff text.
If you read the calif report
> No special harness, or access to models that weren't generally available to everyone were used in the initial bug discovery. I focused on something I had a background in, knew its vulnerability history well, and held a theory that specific bugs lurk within the codebase. This shows that "know your target" is still as applicable as ever, even in the LLM dominated VR age. No model is simply capable of unearthing "all bugs" with simple prompts.
They used a public model as a research assistant and a code assistant. They guided it with expert deep knowledge of the project. OpenAI did not lead this, ChatGPT was not instrumental in this.
It is perhaps at best to say OpenAI made it possible to find the bug more quickly. And on the double edged sword, also made it easier for it to be exploited days ahead of release. So I agree with the original commentator, did they on the balance actually do anything good here?
> OpenAI did not lead this
Again:
> as part of our Patch the Planet initiative
To elaborate:
https://openai.com/index/patch-the-planet/
> We are introducing Patch the Planet
> [...]
> we will be partnering with HackerOne and Calif who are helping us take our efforts further with vulnerability triage, coordinated disclosure, and additional focused vulnerability discovery efforts
Calif found the vulnerability while working under an initiative lead by OpenAI, using publicly available AI tools developed by OpenAI.
> This shows that "know your target" is still as applicable as ever,
totally. I spent yesterday trying to get an AI to make a test case for a very specific bug I had. It kept telling me that it had it. When I could clearly trace thru the code and see it did not. After about 5-10 rounds of that I just wrote the test myself. But at least AI helped with all of the dumb cruft that went around it.
But if I did not know the domain I may have easily just said 'yep looks good'. AI on the other hand saved me at least 3-4 hours of writing all of the scaffolding that made it easier for me to check. In the end the bug had nothing to do with the test. AI did not find that. I went back point by point of what changed in the code and found where I had messed something 2 weeks ago.
A few months ago it seemed like it would not do this. Now in the past week I have come across 3 different ones that did something similar. Just 'stuck' in a local maxima and getting the AI to go around it is a pain. This is probably me and the way I am using it.
Is this better than I had a couple of years ago? I am not sure. Seems different at least.
Is this about my comment about Calif being the ones who found the vulnerability and not OpenAI? Am I wrong?
Wiz claims they they found it with Gemini? I have no idea who actually found it.
Edit: Apparently both found independently
If they can find the vulnerability anyone can. This whole "patch the planet" is marketing trying to cover up for the danger AI is unleashing on internet infrastructure.
> 1 August 2026: 2 days after OpenAI invites Calif to join its “Patch the Planet” initiative, Ryan Austin finds the RCE paths, tweets a cryptographic hash on 5 August, and submits the bug and working RCE proof-of-concept to PHP between 11 August and 14 August.
https://deadneurons.substack.com/p/php2shell-explained-php2s...
yes, they sat on a working exploit for 2 months to hone their magic "this exploits everything"-script. In other words: criminals.
>In other words: criminals.
You're not required to disclose bugs, nor is developing exploits a criminal offense (assuming no intent/conspiracy to hack stuff).
No idea what your comment is even about. The researchers that found and reported this did not sit on this for 2 months.
> 1 August 2026 [...] Ryan Austin finds the RCE paths, tweets a cryptographic hash on 5 August, and submits the bug and working RCE proof-of-concept to PHP between 11 August and 14 August.
> 19–24 August 2026: Wiz Research independently collides with the same bug family using Wiz Atlas, Gemini 4 Argon, and GPT-5.6 Sol, reporting its variants on 24 August.
I get some skepticism about marketing copy, but your comment is blatantly wrong and needlessly rude.
oh, so you say they only sat on it for a week? And then they exhaustively searched all exploit-paths so they have a demo ready 2 months later?
> so you say they only sat on it for a week?
This is absurd, and it shows that you have absolutely 0 idea of how any of this works. Finding a bug and delivering a working RCE 11 days later is absolutely not "sitting on it". This is how this works. You need time to test, exploit, confirm, and so on. Sorry, but just stop being so negative. This can't be healthy for you.
We enabled the disease and provided the vaccine!
The AI economy profits solely off of the broken window fallacy.
But the window was arguably already broken? The opposite would be something like the "bury-head-in-sand economy"?
Here is an old Daoist story to ponder:
In taking precautions against thieves who cut open satchels, search bags, and break open boxes, people are sure to cord and fasten them well, and to employ strong bonds and clasps; and in this they are ordinarily said to show their wisdom. When a great thief comes, however, he shoulders the box, lifts up the satchel, carries off the bag, and runs away with them, afraid only that the cords, bonds, and clasps may not be secure; and in this case what was called the wisdom (of the owners) proves to be nothing but a collecting of the things for the great thief.
http://nothingistic.org/library/chuangtzu/chuang24.html
Trying to make any story too simple makes it worthless.
True or false: LLMs can find security vulnerabilities?
True or false: LLMs can exploit security vulnerablities?
True or false: Any nation with significant resources can make an LLM?
For me these are all true. The last one in specific completely removes the concept of theft and changes it to "enemy nation". Enemy nations can be great thieves, and it's irrelevant, if you don't protect yourself against them you die and everything of yours is stolen.
LLMs are not going away, well, except for you and me maybe. Every state wants to wield digital and informational weapons like this.
Ergo, leave your data at home.
hmmm not sure about this one, the disease was already there it just available to anynone (not only for state sponsored actors) and the vaccine is globally available at a fraction of what it cost to build it.
The disease is unleashing these powerful AI tools to the public before even thinking about the risks.
Automated vulnerability detection existed long before the era of artificial intelligence; many people have been doing this for a long time. All the existing tools and documentation paved the way for what AI is capable of today. Furthermore, undisclosed vulnerabilities still do exist—often discovered by state-sponsored actors who exploit them for opaque purposes (frequently operating outside the legal framework of the country in question).
Patch the Planet? Not with OpenAI tools.
How much time will be left in the Defender’s Window between now and an organization getting Daybreak Access?
This is an insult to actual security researchers and engineers. What a bunch of nonsense words.
OpenAI consistently doesn't know what they're talking about.
Can you be more specific? Why is it an insult?
You're absolutely right! It's not that AI is actually solving any problems, it's that this marketing is a load-bearing part of OpenAI's profit strategy.
Feels like a marketing campaign lol
Point me at anything what _these people do_ that is not a marketing or _confusion_ campaign.
In 2024 I saw a reddit post answering the question: AI is going to program insert name App.
Response: "What's the prompt?"
Yep. I might take minimum wage interns and make million dollar software(or million dollars in 2023), but they often run into issues that a 5 minute review with me solves.
I do wonder if AI is going to eliminate prompt engineering... It's basically all I have left. I feel like I have magic words.
I can't think of how it'll really eliminate prompting, but needing to carefully phrase your language already seems in the way out? Wasn't one of the prompts leading to solving fields problems just "look for fields problems and try very hard" or the equivalent
Why can't I prompt. "Make me a million dollars, no crime" and it work though?
I mean you can, but you're asking the wrong question.
What number in line do you expect to be when asking the same prompt.
For example, why wouldn't OpenAI ask that first long before you get a chance at the model?
Because they need to show several billion dollars in revenue. A million dollars a day would be utter failure for them. If they have $122 billion cash on hand, at 3 percent interest, they're getting $10 million a day just in interest.
If they asked their unreleased bot to get a million dollars and it suggests betting on Kalshi, that would be hilarious.
Again, it's still the wrong question.
Why wouldn't someone with access long before you ask first? For example a model provider like hugging face, or a nation state looking to interrupt some other nations economy?
The problem with any simple question is you're exceptionally unlikely to be the first person to explore the problem space and pick the lowest hanging fruit. It's not impossible, it's just improbable.
--
Lastly why wouldn't OpenAI ask how to make a million dollars a million times? Or if it's cheap enough for them, how to make $1 a trillion times. There is a reason people talk about AI risks, and one particular risk being that the AI companies no longer need us pesky humans to think for them. They hoover up all the GDP and leave the rest of us to fight for scraps.
Yeah, I was explaining this as magic words. It seems like knowing `pandoc` means you can convert any kind of document into any other kind of document.
Knowing uv means you can scaffold any python project. docker lets you build any infrastructure kit.