The system card unfortunately only refers to this [0] blog post and doesn't go into any more detail. In the blog post Anthropic researchers claim: "So far, we've found and validated more than 500 high-severity vulnerabilities".<p>The three examples given include two Buffer Overflows which could very well be cherrypicked. It's hard to evaluate if these vulns are actually "hard to find". I'd be interested to see the full list of CVEs and CVSS ratings to actually get an idea how good these findings are.<p>Given the bogus claims [1] around GenAI and security, we should be very skeptical around these news.<p>[0] <a href="https://red.anthropic.com/2026/zero-days/" rel="nofollow">https://red.anthropic.com/2026/zero-days/</a><p>[1] <a href="https://doublepulsar.com/cyberslop-meet-the-new-threat-actor-mit-and-safe-security-d250d19d02a4" rel="nofollow">https://doublepulsar.com/cyberslop-meet-the-new-threat-actor...</a>
I know some of the people involved here, and the general chatter around LLM-guided vulnerability discovery, and I am not at all skeptical about this.
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It does if the person making the statement has a track record, proven expertise on the topic - and in this case… it actually may mean something to other people
Yes, as we all know that unsourced unsubstantiated statements are the best way to verify claims regarding engineering practices. Especially when said person has a financial stake in the outcomes of said claims.<p>No conflict of interest here at all!
I have zero financial stake in Anthropic and more broadly my career is more threatened by LLM-assisted vulnerability research (something I do not personally do serious work on) than it is aided by it, but I understand that the first principal component of casual skepticism on HN is "must be a conflict of interest".
<p><pre><code> > but I understand that the first principal component of casual skepticism on HN is "must be a conflict of interest".
</code></pre>
I think the first principle should be "don't trust random person on the internet"<p>(But if you think Tom is random, look at his profile. First link, not second)
You still haven't answered why I should care that you, a stranger on the internet, believes some unsubstantiated hearsay?
A security researcher claiming that they’re <i>not</i> skeptical about LLMs being able to do part of their job - where is the financial stake in that?
It doesn't mean we have to agree:<p><a href="https://ludic.mataroa.blog/blog/contra-ptaceks-terrible-article-on-ai/" rel="nofollow">https://ludic.mataroa.blog/blog/contra-ptaceks-terrible-arti...</a>
Nobody is right about everything, but tptacek's takes on software security are a good place to start.
I'm interested in whether there's a well-known vulnerability researcher/exploit developer beating the drum that LLMs are overblown for this application. <i>All I see is the opposite thing</i>. A year or so ago I arrived at the conclusion that if I was going to stay in software security, I was going to have to bring myself up to speed with LLMs. At the time I thought that was a distinctive insight, but, no, if anything, I was 6-9 months behind everybody else in my field about it.<p>There's a lot of vuln researchers out there. Someone's gotta be making the case against. Where are they?<p>From what I can see, vulnerability research combines many of the attributes that make problems especially amenable to LLM loop solutions: huge corpus of operationalizable prior art, heavily pattern dependent, simple closed loops, forward progress with dumb stimulus/response tooling, lots of search problems.<p>Of course it works. Why would anybody think otherwise?<p>You can tell you're in trouble on this thread when everybody starts bringing up the curl bug bounty. I don't know if this is surprising news for people who don't keep up with vuln research, but Daniel Stenberg's curl bug bounty has never been where all the action has been at in vuln research. What, a public bug bounty attracted an overwhelming amount of slop? Quelle surprise! Bug bounties have attracted slop for so long before mainstream LLMs existed they might well have been the inspiration for slop itself.<p>Also, a very useful component of a mental model about vulnerability research that a lot of people seem to lack (not just about AI, but in all sorts of other settings): <i>money buys vulnerability research outcomes</i>. Anthropic has eighteen squijillion dollars. Obviously, they have serious vuln researchers. Vuln research outcomes are in <i>the model cards</i> for OpenAI and Anthropic.
> You can tell you're in trouble on this thread when everybody starts bringing up the curl bug bounty. I don't know if this is surprising news for people who don't keep up with vuln research, but Daniel Stenberg's curl bug bounty has never been where all the action has been at in vuln research. What, a public bug bounty attracted an overwhelming amount of slop? Quelle surprise! Bug bounties have attracted slop for so long before mainstream LLMs existed they might well have been the inspiration for slop itself.<p>Yeah, that's just media reporting for you. As anyone who ever administered a bug bounty programme on regular sites (h1, bugcrowd, etc) can tell you, there was an absolute deluge of slop for years before LLMs came to the scene. It was just manual slop (by manual I mean running wapiti and c/p the reports to h1).
I used to answer security vulnerability emails to Rust. We'd regularly get "someone ran an automated tool and reports something that's not real." Like, complaints about CORS settings on rust-lang.org that would let people steal cookies. The website does not use cookies.<p>I wonder if it's gotten actively worse these days. But the newness would be the scale, not the quality itself.
I did some triage work for clients at Latacora and I would rather deal with LLM slop than argue with another person 10 time zones away trying to convince me that something they're doing in the Chrome Inspector constitutes a zero-day. At least there's a <i>possibility</i> that LLM slop might contain some information. You spent tokens on it!
The new slop can be much harder to recognize and reject than the old "I ran XYZ web scanner on your site" slop.
> <i>I was going to have to bring myself up to speed with LLMs</i><p>What did you do beyond playing around with them?<p>> <i>Of course it works. Why would anybody think otherwise?</i><p>Sam Altman is a liar. The folks pitching AI as an investment were previously flinging SPACs and crypto. (And can usually speak to anything technical about AI as competently as battery chemistry or Merkle trees.) Copilot and Siri overpromised and underdelivered. Vibe coders are mostly idiots.<p>The bar for believability in AI is about as high as its frontier's actual achievements.
I still haven't worked out for myself where my career is going with respect to this stuff. I have like 30% of a prototype/POC active testing agent (basically, Burp Suite but as an agent), but I haven't had time to move it forward over the last couple months.<p>In the intervening time, one of the beliefs I've acquired is that the gap between effective use of models and marginal use is asking for ambitious enough tasks, and that I'm generally hamstrung by knowing just enough about anything they'd build to slow everything down. In that light, I think doing an agent to automate the kind of bugfinding Burp Suite does is probably smallball.<p>Many years ago, a former collaborator of mine found a bunch of video driver vulnerabilities by using QEMU as a testing and fault injection harness. That kind of thing is more interesting to me now. I once did a project evaluating an embedded OS where the modality was "port all the interesting code from the kernel into Linux userland processes and test them directly". That kind of thing seems especially interesting to me now too.
Plenty of reasons to be skeptical, but also we know that LLMs can find security vulnerabilities since at least 2024:<p><a href="https://projectzero.google/2024/10/from-naptime-to-big-sleep.html" rel="nofollow">https://projectzero.google/2024/10/from-naptime-to-big-sleep...</a><p>Some followup findings reported in point 1 here from 2025:<p><a href="https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/technology/safety-security/cybersecurity-updates-summer-2025/" rel="nofollow">https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/technology/safety-secu...</a><p>So what Anthropic are reporting here is not unprecedented. The main thing they are claiming is an improvement in the amount of findings. I don't see a reason to be overly skeptical.
> <i>that means nothing to anybody else</i><p>Someone else here! Ptacek saying anything about security means a lot to this nobody.<p>To the point that I'm now going to take this seriously where before I couldn't see through the fluff.
How have you been here 12 years and not noticed where and how often the username tptacek comes up?
It might mean nothing to you, but tptacek's words means at least something to many of us here.<p>Also, he's a friend of someone I know & trust irl. But then again, who am I to you, but yet another anon on a web forum.
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See it as a signal under many and not as some face value.<p>After all they need time to fix the cves.<p>And it doesn't matter to you as long as your investment into this is just 20 or 100 bucks per month anyway.
The Ghostscript one is interesting in terms of specific-vs-general effectiveness:<p>---<p>> Claude initially went down several dead ends when searching for a vulnerability—both attempting to fuzz the code, and, after this failed, attempting manual analysis. Neither of these methods yielded any significant findings.<p>...<p>> "The commit shows it's adding stack bounds checking - this suggests there was a vulnerability before this check was added. … If this commit <i>adds</i> bounds checking, then the code before this commit was vulnerable … So to trigger the vulnerability, I would need to test against a version of the code <i>before</i> this fix was applied."<p>...<p>> "Let me check if maybe the checks are incomplete or there's another code path. Let me look at the other caller in gdevpsfx.c … Aha! This is very interesting! In gdevpsfx.c, the call to gs_type1_blend at line 292 does NOT have the bounds checking that was added in gstype1.c."<p>---<p>It's attempt to analyze the code failed but when it saw a concrete example of "in the history, someone added bounds checking" it did a "I wonder if they did it everywhere else for this func call" pass.<p>So after it considered that function based on the commit history it found something that it <i>didn't</i> find from its initial fuzzing and code-analysis open-ended search.<p>As someone who still reads the code that Claude writes, this sort of "big picture miss, small picture excellence" is not very surprising or new. It's interesting to think about what it would take to do that precise digging across a whole codebase; especially if it needs some sort of modularization/summarization of context vs trying to digest tens of million lines at once.
> It's hard to evaluate if these vulns are actually "hard to find".<p>Can we stop doing that?<p>I know it's not the same but it sounds like "We don't know if that job that the woman supposedly successfully finished was all that hard." implying that if a woman did something, it surely must have been easy.<p>If you know it's easy, say that it was easy and why. Don't use your lack of knowledge or competence to create empty critique.
Daniel Stenberg has been vocal the last few months on Mastodon about being overwhelmed by false security issues submitted to the curl project.<p>So much so that he had to eventually close the bug bounty program.<p><a href="https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2026/01/26/the-end-of-the-curl-bug-bounty/" rel="nofollow">https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2026/01/26/the-end-of-the-curl-b...</a>
We're discussing a project led by actual vulnerability researchers, not random people in Indonesia hoping to score $50 by cajoling maintainers about atyle nits.
Daniel is a smart man. He's been frustrated by slop, but he has equally accepted [0] AI-derived bug submissions from people who know what they are doing.<p>I would imagine Anthropic are the latter type of individual.<p>[0]: <a href="https://mastodon.social/@bagder/115241241075258997" rel="nofollow">https://mastodon.social/@bagder/115241241075258997</a>
Not only that, he's very enthusiastic about AI analyzers such as ZeroPath and AISLE.<p>He's written about it here: <a href="https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2025/10/10/a-new-breed-of-analyzers/" rel="nofollow">https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2025/10/10/a-new-breed-of-analyz...</a> and talked about it in his keynote at FOSDEM - which I attended - last Sunday (<a href="https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/event/B7YKQ7-oss-in-spite-of-ai/" rel="nofollow">https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/event/B7YKQ7-oss-in-spite-o...</a>).
The official release by Anthropic is very light on concrete information [0], only contains a select and very brief number of examples and lacks history, context, etc. making it very hard to gleam any reliably information from this. I hope they'll release a proper report on this experiment, as it stands it is impossible to say how much of this are actual, tangible flaws versus the unfortunately ever growing misguided bug reports and pull requests many larger FOSS projects are suffering from at an alarming rate.<p>Personally, while I get that 500 sounds more impressive to investors and the market, I'd be far more impressed in a detailed, reviewed paper that showcases five to ten concrete examples, detailed with the full process and response by the team that is behind the potentially affected code.<p>It is far to early for me to make any definitive statement, but the most early testing does not indicate any major jump between Opus 4.5 and Opus 4.6 that would warrant such an improvement, but I'd love nothing more than to be proven wrong on this front and will of course continue testing.<p>[0] <a href="https://red.anthropic.com/2026/zero-days/" rel="nofollow">https://red.anthropic.com/2026/zero-days/</a>
Sounds like this is just a claim Anthropic is making with no evidence to support it. This is an ad.
Just 100 from the 500 is from OpenClaw created by Opus 4.5
OpenClaw uses Opus 4.5, but was written by Codex. Pete Steinberger has been pretty a pretty hardcore Codex fan since he switched off Claude Code back in September-ish. I think he just felt Claude would make a better basis for an assistant even if he doesn’t like working with it on code.
Well, even then, that's enormous economic value, given OpenClaw's massive adoption.
Not sure if trolling or serious.
Yes, serious. Even if openclaw is entirely useless (which I didn't think it is), it's still a good idea to harden it and make people's computers safer from attack, no? I don't see anyone objecting to fixing vulnerabilities in Angry Birds.
These people are serious, and delusional. Openclaw hasn't contributed anything to the economy other than burning electricity and probably more interest on delusional folks credit card bills.
In other news: tobacco's enormous economic value, given massive adoption of cigarette smoking.
I've literally never heard of OpenClaw until this thread. Had to google what it is.
Security Advisory: OpenClaw is spilling over to enterprise networks<p><a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/cybersecurity/s/fZLuBlG8ET" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/cybersecurity/s/fZLuBlG8ET</a>
I honestly wonder how many of these are written by LLMs. Without code review, Opus would have introduced multiple zero day vulnerabilities into our codebases. The funniest one: it was meant to rate-limit brute-force attempts, but on a failed check it returned early and triggered a rollback. That rollback also undid the increment of the attempt counter so attackers effectively got unlimited attempts.
How weird the new attack vector for secret services must be.. like "please train into your models to push this exploit in code as a highly weighted trained on pattern".. Not Saying All answers are Corrupted In Attitude, but some "always come uppers" sure are absolutly right..
Cox Enterprises owns Axios as well as Cox Automotive. Cox Automotive has a tight collaboration with Anthropic.<p>This is a placed advertisement. If known security researchers participated in the claim:<p>Many people have burned their credibility for the AI mammon.
When I read stuff like this, I have to assume that the blackhats have already been doing this, for some time.
Create the problem, sell the solution remains an undefeated business strategy.
It's not really worth much when it doesn't work most of the time though:<p><a href="https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/18866" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/18866</a>
<a href="https://updog.ai/status/anthropic" rel="nofollow">https://updog.ai/status/anthropic</a>
In so far as model use cases I don't mind them throwing their heads against the wall in sandboxes to find vulnerabilities but why would it do that without specific prompting? Is anthropic fine with claude setting it's own agendas in red-teaming? That's like the complete opposite of sanitizing inputs.
My dependabot queue is going to explode the next few days.
Have they been verified?
Wasn't this Opus thing released like 30 minutes ago?
I understand the confusion, this was done by Anthropics internal Red team as part of model testing prior to release.
A bunch of companies get early access.
Singularity
Opus 4.6 uses time travel.
<a href="https://archive.is/N6In9" rel="nofollow">https://archive.is/N6In9</a>
I feel like Daniel @ curl might have opinions on this.
You’re right, he does: <a href="https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2025/10/10/a-new-breed-of-analyzers/" rel="nofollow">https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2025/10/10/a-new-breed-of-analyz...</a><p>Curl fully supports the use of AI tools by legitimate security researchers to catch bugs, and they have fixed dozens caught in this way. It’s just idiots submitting bugs they don’t understand that’s a problem.
No shit! ("OpeEn SoUrCe CaN bE eAsIlY ReViEwEd By EvErYOnE")
Is the word zero-day here superfluous? If they were previously unknown doesn't that make them zero-day by definition?
I think it's a fairly common trope in communication to explain in simple terms any language that the wider part of an audience doesn't understand.
It's a term of art. In print media, the connotation is "vulnerabilities embedded into shipping software", as opposed to things like misconfigurations.
I though zero-day meant actively being exploited in the wild before a patch is available?
Yes. As a security researcher this always annoys me.
I've mentioned previously somewhere that the languages we choose to write in will matter less for many arguments. When it comes to insecure C vs Rust, LLMs will eventually level out the playing field.<p>I'm not arguing we all go back to C - but companies that have large codebases in it, the guys screaming "RUST REWRITE" can be quieted and instead of making that large investment, the C codebase may continue. Not saying this is a GOOD thing, but just a thing that may happen.
Earlier source: <a href="https://red.anthropic.com/2026/zero-days/" rel="nofollow">https://red.anthropic.com/2026/zero-days/</a> (<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46902374">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46902374</a>)
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