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Tue, 10/20/2026 – 12:25
Oren Bear | Product Manager, Thales
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When we published our research benchmark on autonomous AI reverse engineering, the result was hard to ignore. A frontier AI agent equipped with standard decompilation tools found eight of ten planted vulnerabilities in a compiled binary in three minutes and ten seconds. Many software vendors saw it as a warning about the future, something impressive that might mature over the next few years.
The future arrived faster than anyone planned, and it's still speeding up.
On April 7, 2026, Anthropic announced Project Glasswing, a controlled-access program built around Claude Mythos Preview, a restricted frontier model for defensive security work. Anthropic stated that the model had reached a level where it can surpass all but the most skilled humans at finding and exploiting software vulnerabilities. The company considered it too capable to release publicly.
That restriction is less reassuring than it sounds. Glasswing proved that machine-speed vulnerability discovery works at industrial scale, and the capability won't stay behind closed doors. Logan Graham, who leads Anthropic's frontier red team, told reporters in April that other AI companies could release models with similar powers within six to 18 months. That timeline is already running short. On CyberGym, a UC Berkeley benchmark of 1,507 real vulnerabilities across 188 open-source projects, Z.ai's GLM-5.3 reproduces 84.5% of them, ahead of Claude Mythos Preview at 83.1%. GLM-5.3 ships with open weights under a permissive license. Anyone can download it, run it locally, and strip whatever restrictions it came with. Open-weight models still trail the closed frontier at turning a bug into a working exploit, but downloaded weights cannot be recalled or gated.
The question for software vendors is no longer whether attackers will get these capabilities. It's whether your software will be ready when they do.
Webinar AI Can Reverse Engineer Your Software in Minutes.
In this webinar, we examine how this shift is impacting software vendors, particularly those distributing on‑premises or embedded applications.
The Discovery Timeline Has Collapsed
For decades, defenders relied on human latency. Reverse engineering a complex application required specialized expertise, disassembly tools, and weeks or months of manual analysis. Responsible disclosure, vulnerability triage, and patch delivery were all built around that assumption.
Glasswing showed that assumption no longer holds. Anthropic and its partners identified more than 10,000 high- or critical-severity vulnerabilities in critical software systems within about a month of launch. Mozilla shipped a Firefox update with fixes for 271 bugs identified by Mythos Preview, part of a total of 423 security bugs the team fixed in April releases. That is roughly 20 times Mozilla's 2025 monthly average of about 21.
The shockwave reached the entire vulnerability disclosure community, and the numbers have continued to climb. Among 21 notable organizations tracked by Epoch AI, June saw around 1,550 high- and critical-severity CVEs, more than three times the monthly record before Mythos. July reached around 2,500, about five times that record and 60% above June's record-breaking total.
Microsoft shows the same curve. Its July 2026 Patch Tuesday addressed 569 CVEs by Tenable's count, more than four times the 128 from July 2025. For vendors shipping native Windows applications, this is the platform your software runs on, changing faster than ever.
Most of these findings came from AI reasoning over source code. Mozilla's CTO explained that elite researchers find bugs fuzzers miss by reasoning through source code, and that Mythos Preview does the same work at machine speed. If you ship compiled applications, it's tempting to think this wave belongs to open-source maintainers and browser vendors.
It doesn't, for two reasons: your patches and your binaries.
Every Patch Is Now an Exploit Blueprint
A security update fixes a flaw and tells attackers where to look. Comparing the pre-patch and post-patch binaries isolates what changed and leads back to the vulnerability. This is patch diffing, and it used to be slow, specialized work. Even the fastest attacks in recent memory took weeks. WannaCry, the ransomware that shut down hospitals and factories worldwide, struck 59 days after Microsoft released the patch that would have stopped it.
In June 2026, Anthropic
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