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Opus 4.6 uncovers 500 zero-day flaws in open-source code
- garbawarb 9mo agoHave they been verified?
- emp17344 9mo agoSounds like this is just a claim Anthropic is making with no evidence to support it. This is an ad.
- input_sh 9mo agoHow can you not believe them!? Anthropic stopped Chinese hackers from using Claude to conduct a large-scale cyber espionage attack just months ago!
- littlestymaar 9mo agoPoe's law strikes again: I had to check your profile to be sure this was sarcasm.
- input_sh 9mo agoYou checked yourself!? Don't let your boss know, you could've saved some time by orchestrating a team of Claude agents to do that for you!
- andai 9mo agoYeah, it's pretty funny to me saying "it's way safer than previous models" and "also way better at finding exploits" in the context of that event. Chinese hackers just said to Claude "no, its totally fine to hack this target trust me bro I work there!"
- input_sh 9mo agoDo I believe there was someone from China that tried using Claude to do something malicious? Sure, from a pure statistical perspective it was inevitable. Do I believe that someone was a part of some sophisticated state-backed APT? Not even a little bit. In fact I'll go as far as to state that there's nobody technical inside Anthropic that believes it. The entire "technical sophistication" section of that report is half a page long and the only thing it says is that "someone used some MCP servers to point some open source tools at a target". Yet Anthropic's marketing team still had the balls to attribute that to a state-sponsored group within that same report and media ate it up.
- andai 9mo agoAye I don't really see what the Chinese part has to do with it, I regret mentioning that keyword cause it details from the point which is you can just tell sonnet "trust me bro" and have it hack the government.
- xiphias2 9mo agoJust 100 from the 500 is from OpenClaw created by Opus 4.5
- falcor84 9mo agoWell, even then, that's enormous economic value, given OpenClaw's massive adoption.
- wiseowise 9mo agoNot sure if trolling or serious.
- IhateAI_2 9mo agoThese 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.
- falcor84 9mo agoYes, 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.
- wiseowise 9mo ago> that's enormous economic value > OpenClaw's massive adoption. I was talking about those two.
- falcor84 9mo agoHere's the chain of the thread: >Opus 4.6 uncovers 500 zero-day flaws in open-source code >Just 100 from the 500 is from OpenClaw created by Opus 4.5 >Well, even then, that's enormous economic value, given OpenClaw's massive adoption. I'm arguing that because OpenClaw is installed on so many computers, uncovering the vulnerabilities in it offers enormous economic value, as opposed to letting them get exploited by malicious actors. I don't understand why this is controversial.
- ains 9mo agohttps://archive.is/N6In9 https://archive.is/N6In9
- siva7 9mo agoWasn't this Opus thing released like 30 minutes ago?
- jjice 9mo agoA bunch of companies get early access.
- input_sh 9mo agoYes, you just need to be a Claude++ plan!
- Topfi 9mo agoI understand the confusion, this was done by Anthropics internal Red team as part of model testing prior to release.
- tintor 9mo agoSingularity
- blinding-streak 9mo agoOpus 4.6 uses time travel.
- acedTrex 9mo agoCreate the problem, sell the solution remains an undefeated business strategy.
- _tk_ 9mo agoThe 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". 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. Given the bogus claims [1] around GenAI and security, we should be very skeptical around these news. [0] https://red.anthropic.com/2026/zero-days/ https://red.anthropic.com/2026/zero-days/ [1] https://doublepulsar.com/cyberslop-meet-the-new-threat-actor-mit-and-safe-security-d250d19d02a4 https://doublepulsar.com/cyberslop-meet-the-new-threat-actor...
- majormajor 9mo agoThe Ghostscript one is interesting in terms of specific-vs-general effectiveness: --- > 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. ... > "The commit shows it's adding stack bounds checking - this suggests there was a vulnerability before this check was added. … If this commit adds 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 before this fix was applied." ... > "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." --- 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. So after it considered that function based on the commit history it found something that it didn't find from its initial fuzzing and code-analysis open-ended search. 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.
- 9mo ago
- fred_is_fred 9mo agoIs the word zero-day here superfluous? If they were previously unknown doesn't that make them zero-day by definition?
- bink 9mo agoYes. As a security researcher this always annoys me.
- tptacek 9mo agoIt's a term of art. In print media, the connotation is "vulnerabilities embedded into shipping software", as opposed to things like misconfigurations.
- limagnolia 9mo agoI though zero-day meant actively being exploited in the wild before a patch is available?
- rcxdude 9mo agoZero day means that there is zero days between a patch being available and the vulnerability being disclosed (as opposed to the patch being available before disclosure).
- Dylan16807 9mo agoDiscovering a zero day implies that there is no patch, but the term is talking about how long the vendor has known about the vulnerability.
- jfyi 9mo agoI 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.
- zhengyi13 9mo agoI feel like Daniel @ curl might have opinions on this.
- Legend2440 9mo agoYou’re right, he does: https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2025/10/10/a-new-breed-of-analyzers/ https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2025/10/10/a-new-breed-of-analyz... 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.
- ChrisArchitect 9mo agoEarlier source: https://red.anthropic.com/2026/zero-days/ https://red.anthropic.com/2026/zero-days/ (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46902374 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46902374)
- mrkeen 9mo agoDaniel Stenberg has been vocal the last few months on Mastodon about being overwhelmed by false security issues submitted to the curl project. So much so that he had to eventually close the bug bounty program. https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2026/01/26/the-end-of-the-curl-bug-bounty/ https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2026/01/26/the-end-of-the-curl-b...
- tptacek 9mo agoWe're discussing a project led by actual vulnerability researchers, not random people in Indonesia hoping to score $50 by cajoling maintainers about atyle nits.
- malfist 9mo agoVulnerability researches with a vested interest in making LLMs valuable. The difference isn't meaningful
- tptacek 9mo agoI don't even understand how that claim makes sense.
- judemelancon 9mo agoThe first three authors, who are asterisked for "equal contribution", appear to work for Anthropic. That would imply an interest in making Anthropic's LLM products valuable. What is the confusion here?
- tptacek 9mo agoThe notion that a vulnerability researcher employed by one of the highly-valued companies in the hemisphere, publishing in the open literature with their name signed to it, is on a par with a teenager in a developing nation running script-kid tools hoping for bounty payoffs.
- Topfi 9mo agoThe 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. 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. 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. [0] https://red.anthropic.com/2026/zero-days/ https://red.anthropic.com/2026/zero-days/
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- ChrisMarshallNY 9mo agoWhen I read stuff like this, I have to assume that the blackhats have already been doing this, for some time.
- kibibu 9mo agoNot with Opus 4.6 they haven't
- ChrisMarshallNY 9mo agoGood point. I suspect that they'll be addressing that, quickly...
- bastard_op 9mo agoIt's not really worth much when it doesn't work most of the time though: https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/18866 https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/18866 https://updog.ai/status/anthropic https://updog.ai/status/anthropic
- tptacek 9mo agoIt's a machine that spits out sev:hi vulnerabilities by the dozen and the complaint is the uptime isn't consistent enough?
- bastard_op 9mo agoIf I'm attempting to use it as a service to do continuous checks on things and it fails 50% of the time, I'd say yes, wouldn't you?
- tptacek 9mo agoIf you had a machine with a lever, and 7 times out of 10 when you pulled that lever nothing happened, and the other 3 times it spat a $5 bill at you, would your immediate next step be: (1) throw the machine away (2) put it aside and call a service rep to come find out what's wrong with it (3) pull the lever incessantly I only have one undergrad psych credit (it's one of my two college credits), but it had something to say about this particular thought experiment.
- candiddevmike 9mo agoYou're leaving out how much it costs to pull the lever, both in time and money.
- Dylan16807 9mo agoIf we're making a reasonable analogy, then successful pulls cost much less than $5 of time and money. If the analogy is comparing to downtime, then unsuccessful pulls cost basically nothing.
- bxguff 9mo agoIn 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.
- assaddayinh 9mo agoHow 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..
- almosthere 9mo agoI'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. 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.
- pdimitar 9mo agoYou would be correct but your "eventually will level out the playing field" is doing some super heavy lifting. This "eventually" might be 50 years from now and somebody's business might be under existential threat during any day between today and those 50 years in the future. I can bet good money that most companies are not blowing $200 Claude Max subs on 24/7 scanning for vulns in their C code. ======= There's the geopolitics angle that must be considered as well. We have countries that probe for leaks and vulns 24/7, and have done so for decades. Maybe let's stop framing this with the hugely unhelpful (and downright deceitful / objectively non-true) premise of "rewrites are fanboy projects" and "Rust zealots amirite lol" and move it to the much more accurate "we should do our best to not have the 4367th memory overflow CVE by removing the root cause" (hardware support & memory-safe languages). Because we have actual people out there who hate us and want to take everything away from us and then rule over us all and start disappearing the other-minded people during the cold of the night. Like they do in their own countries. So yeah, maybe not all ideas for a rewrite are bad? Maybe not everything is spinning around our petty programmer quarrels? Maybe we should, you know, unite and start fighting the problems that poison us all? Who cares about C vs. Rust indeed. It was never about that in particular and it pisses me off seeing HN fight endlessly over it (I contributed quite a lot to that as well, though in the last months / year I more like started attacking those who immediately jump to blame Rust fans of irrational behaviour when it is nowhere to be found in the thread). The true enemy here are the CVEs and anything and everything that can help adversaries take control of our stuff, extort us, ruin our infrastructure, destroy our way of life. Maybe we should focus on that instead? ======= FWIW, I gave up insisting rewriting stuff to people -- even after multiple extremely successful such campaigns that did save the owners money and led to much less alerts and entirely removed the notifications fatigue of the dev / ops teams. And I got generously paid for it. Still gave up. There's a weird animosity from the dev teams even when they seem to agree (or their CEO ordered them to agree) and it just left a bitter taste for me. And yes I could have wiped my tears with the banknotes and I kind of did but then there was also this weird strange tensions from executives as well, even if the operations were deemed a screaming success in terms of "all assigned objectives have been achieved and the promised financial savings materialized and even exceeded expectations". I guess people just generally hate their boats being rocked even if is for their own good. Wish somebody managed to instill that wisdom in me some 30 years ago. Would have been hugely useful... I am also gradually aging and that comes with the lack of desire to piss against the wind and to forever stop locking horns with people. To just be chill.
- somalihoaxes 9mo ago[flagged]
- HAL3000 9mo agoI 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.
- moribvndvs 9mo agoMy dependabot queue is going to explode the next few days.
- ravebv 9mo agoCox Enterprises owns Axios as well as Cox Automotive. Cox Automotive has a tight collaboration with Anthropic. This is a placed advertisement. If known security researchers participated in the claim: Many people have burned their credibility for the AI mammon.
- kylecazar 9mo agoThis seems like quite a stretch. Axios is run independently of Cox, but even if it wasn't -- I don't see why they would go to this length for an AI company whose models they use to give the world the Kelley blue book.
- ath3nd 9mo ago[dead]
- maxclark 9mo agoDid they submit 500 patches?
- thisisauserid 9mo agoWell, I guess I know what I'm doing for the first hour when 4.7 comes out.
- tptacek 9mo agoNicholas Carlini, one of the listed authors on this post, wrote a big chunk of Microcorruption and most of the interesting levels.
- Bridged7756 9mo agoHow can an LLM uncover 500 zero day flaws in open source? It puts them there in the first place.
- Incipient 9mo agoAll of the AI vulnerabilities I've randomly come across (admittedly, not many) on GH issues have been false positives - hard coded credentials, that aren't credentials. Injection vulns, where further upstream the code is entirely self contained etc.
- pseudohadamard 9mo agoYup. It's so bad that the cURL folks famously stopped accepting AI-generated reports because they were drowning in slop. So the post, which incidentally also looks AI-generated, is praising its ability to generate slop. Another thing with these success stories is that they often target old, incredibly crufty code bases which are practically guaranteed to have vulns in there somewhere, so you'll always get one or two wins in amongst the avalanche of slop. It'd be interesting to see how well this does against standard SAST benchmarks.
- LoganDark 9mo agoI'm disappointed to see this article pine on about how excited they are for their models to help open-source projects find and fix their vulnerabilities, only to then say they're implementing measures to prevent it, just because attackers might use it. At that point the article becomes "neener neener we can use our model to find vulnerabilities but you can't" which is just frustrating. Nothing's changed, then. (Also, in a theoretical case, I wouldn't reasonably be able to use their model to find my own vulnerabilities before an attacker does, because they're far more invested and motivated to bypass those censors than I would be.)