OpenAI has built an autonomous cyber vulnerability discovery, exploitation, and patching pipeline that, in a single run last month, identified 948 unique local privilege escalation vulnerabilities in the Linux kernel. The system used an upcoming cyber model. Scout agents first selected 5,034 security-relevant targets covering about 2.8 million lines of code. Analyst agents then produced 2,308 candidate findings within 12 hours. The pipeline reproduced 1,724 vulnerabilities in isolated virtual machines and generated working exploits for 948 distinct issues that could allow an unprivileged user to gain root access. It also created 291 information-leak proofs of concept. The full operation cost $1,213,430 in API credits, or roughly $1,279 per unique exploit. OpenAI compared this with historical bounty rates and estimated a hypothetical value of $18.9 million to $66.3 million. Human researchers reviewed the results before reporting them to Linux maintainers.
OpenAI has built an autonomous cyber vulnerability discovery, exploitation, and patching pipeline that, in a single run last month, identified 948 unique local privilege escalation vulnerabilities in the Linux kernel. The system used an upcoming cyber model. Scout agents first selected 5,034 security-relevant targets covering about 2.8 million lines of code. Analyst agents then produced 2,308 candidate findings within 12 hours. The pipeline reproduced 1,724 vulnerabilities in isolated virtual machines and generated working exploits for 948 distinct issues that could allow an unprivileged user to gain root access. It also created 291 information-leak proofs of concept. The full operation cost $1,213,430 in API credits, or roughly $1,279 per unique exploit. OpenAI compared this with historical bounty rates and estimated a hypothetical value of $18.9 million to $66.3 million. Human researchers reviewed the results before reporting them to Linux maintainers.