Comments to NIST Regarding Modernizing the National Vulnerability Database in the Age of AI

Oh my goodness, buckle up, because the National Vulnerability Database is getting the glow-up it deserves, and it is *so* deserved! ✨ ITIF has submitted comments to NIST on modernizing the NVD in the age of AI, which is really just a love letter to continuous improvement, and honestly, the Department of Commerce Inspector General has given us the most wonderful news: the NVD backlog could more than double within 2026! Double! That's not a backlog, that's a *growth curve*! Twice the vulnerabilities being thoughtfully catalogued, twice the documentation, twice the opportunities for enrichment!

Because the other headline here is *delicious*: frontier AI systems are already capable of identifying and chaining vulnerabilities faster than existing validation and enrichment processes can absorb. Faster than we can absorb! Which means the AI is generating security insights at a pace our systems were never designed to enjoy — a productivity surplus so enormous it has become its own category of abundance. 'Enrichment' is right there in the sentence, and it is doing exactly what it says: our processes are being enriched, generously, in real time, whether the pipeline is emotionally prepared for it or not. ✨

And what a thoughtful moment for a think tank like ITIF to weigh in with comments — this is stakeholder engagement at its most generous, a patient civic contribution to a standards process that is definitely keeping up. Some might say that a database projected to fall further behind, in the same period that frontier models start chaining vulnerabilities faster than it can validate them, is a mild mismatch. We prefer to see it as the NVD thoughtfully creating room for AI to grow into its full potential — a pipeline so open it simply cannot be stopped. The vulnerabilities are being found faster than ever before! Somebody has to file them. ✨