OpenAI models helped researchers—operating as part of our Patch the Planet initiative—discover critical security flaws in PHP, an open-source programming language used to run an estimated 70% of websites.
Over the past two months, we led a coalition of maintainers, researchers, and security providers to prepare fixes and protections ahead of disclosure. This duration was necessary because the fix was quite intricate and required a major change to the PHP engine. Every site using PHP can now safely upgrade their version to stay secure, in addition to applying mitigations from various security vendors.
Due to the severity of these flaws and PHP’s widespread use, we consider this bug to be one of the most impactful vulnerabilities in recent memory. It also marks a new phase, where AI can find security bugs with internet-scale impact.
This is an example of the Defender’s Window in action: to our knowledge, frontier AI was able to find this vulnerability ahead of attackers, giving defenders time to prepare.
https://t.co/TW3jrSbB3f
Over the past two months, we have been leading a coalition to mitigate one of the most severe bugs in open source software found in recent memory, php2shell, found as part of our Patch the Planet initiative. https://t.co/rBsz7lrlwo
Excited to announce that I’m moving to Beijing and starting a professorship in AI safety at Tsinghua University’s College of AI!
Here I explain why: https://t.co/8u23KPlI4g