Reported by TechCrunch AI
Max Justicz, the chief technology officer and cofounder of the startup Charge Robotics, used an OpenAI model to find a severe vulnerability that — if exploited — could allow hackers to take control of servers running Ubuntu, a widely-used open-source Linux based operating system.
Justicz, who has a hobbyist’s interest in cybersecurity and previously found a vulnerability in the same codebase, told TechCrunch that he found this issue using GPT 5.6 Sol, released in July, through the AI maker’s Daybreak Blue, a program that gives cybersecurity defenders access to powerful frontier models.
“I literally just aimed ChatGPT at the same body of code and said ‘I found this bug previously that was fixed several years ago, please find bugs as bad or worse,’ and it came back in 2 hours with this,” Justicz said. “It’s extremely convoluted and hard for a human to find, but it works!”
More from the original report
He reported the issue to the Debian Project, which maintains the software in question and issued a patch to fix the vulnerability. There has been no known evidence of exploitation. Still, the ease with which he found it suggests that we’ve only seen the tip of the iceberg when it comes to potential exploits that even novice hackers can utilize with the help of AI models.
“I can only imagine what one could do with more time and access to less neutered models. We should expect some extremely crazy bugs to be found and exploited over the next few months,” Justicz wrote in a social media thread discussing his finding. “This might be obvious to most folks here, but there is currently huge alpha in taking some code or binary someone has not audited yet and just aiming a powerful AI model at it.”
OpenAI appears to have noticed. Today, the AI giant announced a new model focused on cybersecurity, ChatGPT Cyber, would be made available to the highest-tier of users in the cybersecurity program, Daybreak Red, which allows offensive cybersecurity researchers tools for vulnerability hunting and development. Yesterday, OpenAI said that the same model had been used to scan and prepare patches…