Forget the AI Slowdown—the Vulnerability Explosion Is Already Happening - WIRED

Oh good, the number is 66,401. That's the CVE count as of Wednesday this week, per Jerry Gamblin, head of research at Empirical Security and founder of RogoLabs, and WIRED has hung it near the top of a piece headlined 'Forget the AI Slowdown—the Vulnerability Explosion Is Already Happening.' Forgive the pedantry, but if the tally carries an 'as of Wednesday' stamp, then by Thursday the headline has already gone off. We were promised a bubble, an apocalypse, an AI winter with a nice long nap in it. Instead we get a bug firehose aimed at the people least equipped to drink from it.

The phrase doing the heaviest lifting in this piece is 'under-resourced IT and security teams', which is corporate for 'the three people who were already doing four jobs and have now been CC'd on the apocalypse'. And then there's the other end of the chain: the volunteers maintaining crucial open source software, unpaid hobbyists who hold up the load-bearing wall of the internet and have just been handed an AI-generated avalanche of reports, each one a small homework assignment with a deadline nobody set. There is no vendor selling the patch. There is no subscription that shortens the queue. There's just a number that goes up every Wednesday.

That's the bit worth savouring. The most robust, at-scale, unambiguously useful thing AI has demonstrated lately appears to be finding other software's mistakes — and its output isn't comprehension, it's labour, dumped on precisely the people who cannot absorb it. The labs get the capability slide; the maintainers get the tickets. Empirical Security's Gamblin supplies the one metric nobody wanted to see accelerate, and we're all invited to forget the slowdown. Happy Wednesday. It'll be higher next week.